The White Valentine

Risotto

I’d work from recipes, measure carefully, hover
anxiously. Be so bored by the craft and science
I’d then lose all interest in eating it.
So I cooked risotto every night for a month,
made it instinctive, natural, a simple habit,
as if I’d grown up in a red tiled Italian town
where emerald basil sprouts wildly in the gutters.

Rice, onion, garlic abandoned into hot butter
without a thought. Pepper. Bubbling white wine.
Stock, slipping from a jug uncalculated.
Dared break the cardinal rule never to leave it.
Judged by eye. Knew by the soft heaving gloss
when to let saffron or prawns or asparagus
fall from my heedless hands. Got it so perfect

I can start from scratch, soon be piling plates,
like breathing, like walking, like humming Puccini,
as if another woman, olive eyed, laughing
like Sunday church bells all the while, has done it.

Published: 10 February 2014
ISBN: 978 1 905208 2 27
Pages: 64

“In this scrupulously unsentimental collection, full of crisp, lucent imagery, the reader is transported to exquisitely rendered physical and emotional landscapes. Fully engaged with the material world, these poems interrogate memory and family mythology to reveal the darkness beneath luminous surfaces. Reading these poems – many of which engage with water – I felt that I was watching dazzling tropical fish dart across a tank.”

Catherine Smith

“‘Aren’t there laws against letters as young/as this travelling on their own by air?’ asks the poet in ‘Enda’s Letter’. Missives, communications (including the extraordinary ‘The White Valentine’, a Valentine like no other), together with a sense of place and history inform these beautifully constructed poems. Almost by stealth, Mary Woodward gives us poems which surprise and reverberate, again and again.”

Julian Stannard