Eyewear Publishing Ltd.
Drawn On Water
Drawn On Water
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By Mel Pryor
Drawn on Water is a beautifully considered collection of poems that encompass the joy, complexities and risks of family life and relationships, The pamphlet explores a range of feelings from pregnancy and birth to parenthood and aging, yet remains firmly rooted in the natural world. The poet also addresses our struggle against the instinct to withdraw emotionally from the world in an accessible and essentially hope affirming style.
Mel Pryor read history at Durham University and qualified as a solicitor. Her work has appeared in the magazines Coffee House Poetry, The Rialto, Acumen, Mslexia and South Bank Poetry. She has been placed in several poetry competitions and has won the Essex Poetry Competition and Ware Poetry Competition Sonnet Prize. Kathleen Jamie said of her poem Rattus Rattus , which came second in the 2013 Mslexia Poetry Competition, 'there is an obvious intelligence at work in this poem'.
You can read the poem here: https://www.mslexia.co.uk/magazine/newwriting/nwpoem2_59.php
Mel Pryor's work is a huge pleasure to read. Her eye for nature, human and the world, makes you stop, think and reflect on the accuracy of the observations. Her ear for rhythm in verse that is formal, or free, yet always internally musical, is breathtaking and uplifting, and makes one want to have written many of the poems and lines oneself. She writes of her own experience and beyond this. I thoroughly recommend her first publication. — Sarah Wardle
Mel Pryor’ sharp and undaunted gaze sees the grand in the small, the primordial in the present, and the future in the past. She has the intellect of a scientist, the ear of a musician and the heart of a poet. — Kathryn Maris
Alder
for Nancy Medlicott
Hoof-pools brim, the berry hedgerows
unload the notes of birds whose names
I can’t recall, and here’s a ditch
that winter’s shifted into river
thieving the sky, the frantic clouds,
the reflection of an alder tree
like a single cerebellum nerve cell.
It’s clear these days I’ve been too much
inside, though the mind is a changing thing,
can change like alder drawn on water.
Part of Eyewear's 20/20 pamphlet series
