By Rachael Boast

The first drops of rain, a pulse in the leaves,
enough to make aspirin by rubbing

my fingers where my fingers shouldn’t be,
something here remains of love

in the slow hours of imagined time
recovering in the afterlife as surprising

as what came before I searched on both sides
trying to locate myself where you are

a downpour and a flash of light
under the willow, under the night.


From Void Studies, the new collection from Rachael Boast, winner of the Forward and Seamus Heaney Prizes for poetry.

Based on a project originally proposed by the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud but never completed, Void Studies is an airy and beautiful collection of poems written as musical etudes. Boast's tone poems are works of pure music, not conveying any direct message - but instead summoning the abstract spirit of their subject. 

