How John Donne writing is like a plane landing –
Jemma Borg
the commonality is the arriving: overhead, decrescendo, descending, cohesive above the barbed-wire fence, hovering with a ribbon of fuel: caustic, the fragile cathedral into wind, towards contact, the sound hollowing, hollering, world to world; decremental, touching – just – ventriloquising then the core crumbles, then is human, then disappears: the bare task performed: emperor of sound – pssssshhhhuuuuuuuuooooooo! – grounding to rest: engines bawling – and the sound entering the body, kettled into a word – and the word caught safely by the pen, the ear, the mouth – and what is the body but a vessel sliding onto the earth of a newfound* world – can you hear it? the fantastic to the mundane and vice versa – the sound of men claiming land, beautifully *sic
Jemma Borg’s second collection, Wilder (Pavilion, 2022), was a Laurel Prize winner and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. She was recently commissioned to take a poem for a walk in the High Weald National Landscape.