Caroline Price grew up in Sussex and then Suffolk. She studied Music at the University of York, and violin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She now lives near Tunbridge Wells, and works primarily for Kent Music. In her late twenties she started writing poetry seriously, and her first of now three collections, Thinking of the Bull Dancers, was published in 1987 (Littlewood Press), while she become actively involved in the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society and the foundation of the London poetry group N7. Over the years her poems have won many prizes and appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies. In 2007 Caroline was awarded a residency at the Villa Marguerite Yourcenar, a centre for European writers in northern France, to finish work on a third collection, Wishbone, which was published in November 2008 by Shoestring Press

Quelle: poetry pf

Last Call

Look past the house where strangers live
and across the lawn: in front of the poplar hedge,
that’s where she buried his ashes, in the ghost
of a vegetable garden, no more now
than a rectangle of deeper green —

he had begun, even before he died,
to let his plot grass over, its edges draw in,
the rhubarb thickening, stray sprouts and onions
run to seed, the furrows littered with potatoes
tiny as knucklebones; each year

turning some earth but working it less,
allowing rough grasses to sow themselves
and pigeons and pheasants pick their way
undisturbed, depositing other seeds
so that thistles soon pushed up, and red dead-nettle, speedwell;

gradually a showing of all the wild flowers from around,
though nothing as prolific as the poppies she saw
that next morning, that were suddenly there
catching her eye from the kitchen window,
an outburst, a dancing line of red.

in collection Wishbone, 2008, Shoestring Press,
ISBN: 978 1 904886 78 5;
first published in anthology, Windows, 2007, Worple Press