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Poem of the Week: ‘postscript’ by Mary Jean Chan

25 November 2024

Our Poem of the Week is ‘postscript’, the final poem from Bright Fear, Mary Jean Chan’s second collection.

postscript

in the penultimate scene where mother
and child are listening to one another

speak in spite of everything the way
an orchestra might play on bravely

even when the audience claps before
it’s time you will want to stay awhile

in subtropical winter heat as sunlight
blazes through the fog of memory you

begin to wonder if the origin story can
at last be transfigured into the version

redacted through the centuries (the one
in which the garden comes alive) a queer

child’s vision of paradise where the trees
are free to bear their multitudinous light

 

Copyright © Mary Jean Chan, 2023. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘postscript’ by Mary Jean Chan is from Bright Fear.

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Mary Jean Chan
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This keenly anticipated new collection from the Costa Poetry Award-winner speaks ‘out of fear and grief into splendour and joy’.

About the Author

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award.

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About the Author
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