Sarah Doyle is the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poet-in-Residence, and co-author of Dreaming Spheres: Poems of the Solar System (PS Publishing, 2014). She has been published in numerous magazines, webzines, and anthologies, with poetry appearing most recently in Wild Court, Dust Poetry, Irisi, Poetry Birmingham, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Finished Creatures, Anthropocene Poetry, and the Places of Poetry anthology. Sarah has been placed in over forty competitions, winning the Wolverhampton Literature Festival (WoLF) poetry competition and Holland Park Press’s Brexit in Poetry 2019, and being runner-up in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize 2019 and the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize 2020. She was highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry and in the Forward Prizes 2018. Sarah holds an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway College, University of London, and is currently researching a PhD in the poetics of meteorology at Birmingham City University. A pamphlet of collage poems – Something so wild and new in this feeling – inspired by Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals was published by V. Press in March 2021. More at sarahdoyle.co.uk or Twitter: @PoetSarahDoyle
Under Silver How
As we were going along we were stopped
at once, at the distance perhaps of 50 yards
from our favourite birch tree. It was yielding
to the gusty wind with all its tender twigs.
The sun shone upon it, and it glanced
in the wind like a flying sunshiny shower.
It was a tree in shape, with stem and branches,
but it was like a spirit of water. The sun went
in, and it resumed its purplish appearance,
the twigs still yielding to the wind, but not
so visibly to us. The other birch trees
that were near it looked bright and cheerful,
but it was a creature by its own self among them.
Sarah Doyle
from Something so wild and new in this feeling by Sarah Doyle
Something so wild and new in this feeling
by Sarah Doyle
“In these inventive and adventurous collage poems, Sarah Doyle presents Dorothy Wordsworth’s exuberant feeling for life and language in a fresh fabric of her own making. Sympathetic and insightful, tactful, and imaginative, Doyle’s compositions refract the energies of Dorothy’s writings through the subtle medium of her own sensibility, and the result is at once daring and illuminating.”
Gregory Leadbetter
“In Something so wild and new in this feeling, Sarah Doyle has taken Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals and developed excerpts into poems, finding felicities of phrasing, musicality, and ideas. Doyle’s skills in pacing, use of the line, and the possibilities of form help us appreciate anew Wordsworth’s habits of thought and close attention to the natural world. With Wordsworth and Doyle, the reader hears the birds singing in the mist.”
Carrie Etter