Lauren Mason

Featured Poet

Hoverflies

each afternoon the hoverflies
hang like apostrophes
between the brackets
of sun and moon

at 3pm they appear tethered
to the subtexts of flowers
as ellipses follow a whispered vow

each afternoon the hoverflies
present themselves like assertions:
to master inertia
is to master everything

these afternoons of waiting
hoverflies refuse the dichotomy
of stillness and action
and I hover

adjacent to language
adjacent to your question
where breath lifts off
and breath collapses

Forest and Dove

after Max Ernst

O lover, would you look at this —
all the carbon of us, seizing
past the golden hour.
Knuckled deadwood, clutching itself.

There is no arriving, no leaving
this forest — no matter where we hide
a concertina of shadows
forces the night song from us.

Other creatures here are silent —
knowing time only
through the stark alarms
of daybreak and moonrise.

Within our dark serrations,
a bird is caught —
widening eye, red triangle mouth,
missing heart.

December, with Oranges

When I said I hoped desire might be simple here
what I meant was — let me undress beneath the low sun,
try to forget this year’s droughts,
next year’s debts.

I stole an orange for you —
the orchard was heavy with fruit and woodsmoke —
could we gaze at it so long it eclipses
our everyday glances?

When I ask you to sit with me and strip away the pith,
what I want to say is – remind me how you taste.
So far into the season, all I know is
the ghost of heat, the risk of bitterness.

Lauren Mason is based in Bristol and works as an NHS nurse and mindfulness teacher. Her creative practice includes poetry, music, and photography; and she plays bass and incorporates spoken word with experimental doom/sludge band TORPOR. Her poems have been published in journals including Finished Creatures and Perverse, and anthologies including the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry (2021) where she was Highly Commended. She holds an MA in Writing Poetry from Poetry School/Newcastle University. Her debut collection is looking for a home. Instagram @abstract_ions and @torpor_uk, occasional tweets @l_e_mason

Lauren wrote the following commentary about her poems:

These poems coalesce around a time of questioning and transition as I approached 40, and they feature in my debut collection. They explore personal themes, but, as always, the poetic self is an exploration and re-telling of autobiographical elements.  One of the key considerations of my collection is distance, and how perspective alters everything — memory, identity, empathy, responsibility. The collection is broadly divided into three imaginative and physical landscapes — desert, forest, and mountain — which lend themselves to the investigation of certain relationships with people, place, and self.

‘Hoverflies’ started life years ago as a draft written during lockdown, as I was recovering from Covid. I rested in the summer garden each afternoon, and hoverflies would unfailingly appear at 3pm, seeming to hang in front of me. I was fascinated by their mastery of inertia; it became a powerful metaphor when I was facing up to my ambivalence about having children alongside dwindling potential fertility. I began researching the hoverfly and came across its scientific name ‘epistrophe’, which led me to ‘apostrophe’, and the poem began unfolding along these lines of enquiry — what is turned away from, or unsaid. I can see how informed this poem is by my meditation practice — ending in the pause between one breath and another, that place outside of doing or certainty or language, where we can learn to find space around our suffering.  In writing about this poem, the other meaning of ‘epistrophe’ makes itself known — a figure of speech whereby a word is repeated to give emphasis or draw attention. This calls me back to the hoverfly, repeating itself in my afternoons, drawing my attention.

I often write from visual art, finding it an incredible source of poetic inspiration. An artwork can conjure a visceral feeling in me that I feel compelled to write into, and I love the way that writing from art opens new imaginative landscapes.  ‘Forest and Dove’ transforms its central relationship into the gnarled environment of an old growth woodland, inspired by Max Ernst’s picture of the same title. How do we stay committed to nurturing the ecology of a relationship at times when it feels too dark and dense to see out of?  What is here in this forest that might be a teacher? I’m fascinated by the ways in which metaphor has a transformational effect in all directions — the poem creates its own world, which seeps forwards into the everyday and backwards into memory.  In writing a trapped bird into the landscape of my own relationship, it must now be attended to — its ‘widening eye, red triangle mouth/ missing heart.’

‘December, with Oranges’ was written after my 40th birthday spent walking in the mountains of Majorca. It’s a magical place in winter — the valleys are full of citrus groves, woodsmoke hazing the air. Descending from the mountains into the valley, I had the feeling of leaving the realm of abstract thought, with all its attempts to predict and clarify, and coming back into sense perception. The stolen orange in the centre of the poem is an invitation to return to what is here, with all its risks and uncertainties, an invitation back into the sensual.