The Shape of a Forest

By Jemma L. King

These poems of desire, loss, and revenge explore lives caught in the gravity of their own orbit. Haunting, distinctive, and sensual, The Shape of a Forest has unblinking scope. This sophisticated debut collection moves from the historical to the contemporary: Genghis Khan surveys his territory while Amelia Earhart disappears to myth. The Belvedere Apollo is dug up heralding the onset of the Renaissance as a tiger meets a foe in a Siberian forest, the Pendle witches are hung in Lancashire, and in tsunami-struck Japanese gardens, South Sea islands, and New York hotel rooms, lives are loosened like milk teeth. The Shape of a Forest is a powerful survey of life and of human experience that spans centuries and the continents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781909844001

Jemma L. King

Jemma L. King teaches literature and creative writing at Aberystwyth University where she also completed her doctoral thesis. Winner of the Terry Hetherington Award for young writers in 2011, she has published her creative and academic work internationally. She is a founding member of the Centre for Women, Writing and Literary Culture and is a reviewer of contemporary literature for numerous publications.

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The Shape of a Forest

Jemma L King

Jemma L King currently teaches literature and creative writing at Aberystwyth University where she also completed her doctoral thesis. She won the The Terry Hetherington Young Writer of the Year Award in 2011 and her creative and academic work has been published internationally. She is a founding member of the Centre for Women, Writing and Literary Culture and is a reviewer of contemporary literature for numerous publications.

For my parents

Amelia Earhart

In 2010, a team of researchers from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery discovered the remains of a 1930s female American castaway on the remote and uninhabited island of Nikumaroro in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is strongly believed that the castaway was Amelia Earhart, the pioneering female pilot who disappeared in 1937 whilst attempting to circumnavigate the world by air.

i

For someone so accustomed to speed,

silence and stillness was something.

It fell to a hum.

It widened.

First, an inventory of quiet invaded and took root.

Each variety lived

and sang one note.

But this shelf fell off, deeply,

plaintively cut to the igneous core.

The air plucked at bird string,

marsupial chatter, and

tapped irregular fingers to it.

Each scrambled song an insult

to one who craved an engine and a wing.

At first, she went mad.

ii

The damning thing was

the finger bone. Hers, they said.

That and the pre-war American cosmetics. Misplaced

in a land without a metal press or edges,

nature powdered to a pigment,

or hands to press the buttons.

That, and the upturned oyster shells,

shallow buckets laid out in rows

to plug up the sand,

drain the sky, resist

the wretched equatorial

heat.

The desperation that brands the spot

where the star imploded

in the most sparse

edge of the galaxy. Unnoticed

surrounded by star birds and star crabs

caught in the gravity

of their own orbits.