Infragreen

By Kate Bingham

Perceptive, persuasive and intricately made, the poems of Kate Bingham's third collection, Infragreen, take the reader on a startling and unfamiliar journey through everyday experiences and phenomena. Her keen eye, reflectiveness and quiet wit endow her subjects with a shimmering freshness. Set within the four walls of home, on the streets of north London and in the Yorkshire countryside, the poems build out from mundane activities such as taking the pill, traveling a daily bus route and scything thistles. In Bingham's hands, the familiar sights and hypnotic routines that normally lull the brain into unthinking acquiescence are the starting points for finding new richness in the world around us and our participation in it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seren
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781781722459

Kate Bingham

Dame Kate Bingham served as the Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, on a seven-month unpaid secondment, steering a team of experts to deliver the world’s fastest Covid-19 vaccination programme. She is Managing Partner at life sciences venture capital firm SV Health Investors where she co-leads SV’s biotech franchise which has a long history of developing transformational new medicines. SV’s investments have led to the launch of twenty drugs for inflammatory and autoimmune disease, blindness and cancer. At SV, Kate co-manages a number of global biotech venture funds which make investments into innovative companies developing novel therapeutics and she helped launch the Dementia Discovery Fund. She is a board member of the Francis Crick Institute and was awarded a DBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her services as Chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce.The author proceeds will be donated to the new university The New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) and early years education, development and advocacy charity Kindred Squared.

Book preview

Notes

I

Ultragreen

A water drop

turns in its skin at the end of the garden

and opens one eye to the sun.

Unsteadily, at the speed of light, its plain

no-coloured heart breaks into such a green I can hear it

loud and bright and green to distraction.

It turns its eye in my brain, looks out

and sees what I have seen.

Something like photosynthesis begins.

Infragreen

Something the sun and I see eye to eye in

winks in the crux of a leaf.

For every turn of the turning earth

it makes a tiny correction

half letting go of itself

half hanging on.

Spring

You know what the sun is like

it has a way of looking at us from side to side

of rising above its various nationalities

and making things grow

as if that’s what a life-form has to do

to get more attention.

Up come snow drops

pushing and shoving and putting on weight

daffodil nubs break out all at once

where the grass is thin

and even the weak municipal crocuses

divide and multiply, insisting they matter.

An empty plastic milk container

left on the kitchen table

takes a breath, increasing in volume

filling with light.

look at the rain it always seems to know what to do

coming down clear and direct silver and fearless

many too many to count in one quick freshwater shoal

no thought no thought at all for what happens next

shaped by the air it runs through going its absolute fastest

round at one end sharp at the other in and out of control

it manages somehow to look its best its every last drop

clean and true and hurrying to put its foot in its footstep

falling over itself into earth’s cracked bowl

it disappears as it collects vanishing from the pavement up

grounding the sky and lifting filthy waters

falling into itself in the street as if only falling matters

On Highgate Hill

How it rained;

we caught the bus up