Dad, Remember You Are Dead

By Jacqueline Saphra

Jacqueline Saphra will follow her critically acclaimed, T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted All My Mad Mothers (2017) with Dad, Remember You Are Dead, a sister volume to her previous collection, taking on the canon in an examination of fatherhood and daughterhood within a wider context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781911027751

Jacqueline Saphra

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher and activist. She is the author of nine plays, five chapbooks and five poetry collections. The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing But Naked Women (The Emma Press) won Best Collaborative Work at The Sabotage Awards. Recent collections from Nine Arches Press are All My Mad Mothers (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Dad, Remember You are Dead and One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets. Jacqueline is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches at The Poetry School. Her latest collection, Velvel's Violin (Nine Arches Press, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Book preview

The Power

The daughter won’t. The dad dictates.

The daughter smiles, the dad declines

a trade-off; so the daughter waits.

The daughter won’t. The dad dictates.

While you are small and I am great

you will! he yells. Slow years unwind.

The daughter won’t, the dad dictates,

the daughter smiles, the dad declines.

Carina

Like the vessel that floats

through the night

its celestial keel a glitter of bones

a spine bound by fire and light

he’ll no longer careen: after the shock

after the pain, he will walk

say the prophets in green.

Where he is collagen, calcium

crumbling, they’ll fix him

they promise, with bolts of titanium

buy him more years.

Let them build me a father

a new one, a safe one

his crooked keel

caulked and steady with stars.

Lessons My Father Taught Me

I. Cycling

Must I? Don’t make me. I wish I could run

from the chill of the challenge. I carp and I cry

as he sprinkles some grit in the white of my eye

as a father will do. I’m weedy and green

so he gives me a push but the push is no fun

sends me spinning to nowhere whatever I try

and I baulk at the brakes and I’m making a scene

though I know he won’t like it. I teeter and lean

and I let myself fall: please god, don’t let me die.

It’s nothing, stop crying, you’re making a scene

he says, Mothered to hell but the damage is done.

It’s a matter of balance. It seems I have