Amanda Sewell was born in 1945, and has been writing since childhood. She was educated at the Universities of Birmingham and East Anglia, and has taught English in Paris, Sydney and Brighton. She is married, with one son. Her first volume of poems The Appropriate Country was published in 2001, by Waterloo Press, Brighton. She had previously been published in magazines as diverse as London Magazine, The Listener, Twentieth Century, Nineties Poetry, Quadrant and Eratica. Her work spans more than three decades. The late poets Alan Ross, Stevie Smith and George MacBeth all encouraged her to write.

Quelle: poetry p f

North Alaska

Today the sky is whiter than snow.
The sun rises: red as Bac n’ Pieces
in the Arctic Coastal Trading Store
at the corner of Ankovah Street, where
the frozen ocean, solid as Pompeii,
is a tableau of crème de menthe green:
a freeze frame, repeated again and again.

Black as bullets, cartoonish snow-mobiles,
batman out of this frozen Gotham,
on to the tundra, with its skating-rink ice,
as buttermilk polar bears with curranty eyes,
gather under the gothic arches of Bowhead
whale jaw-bones: famished; framed,
gigantic, mythic ghosts: immense; immane.

The Northern Lights weave coloured
curtains in the sky. Browerville’s a bracelet
lit by stars. Huskies in their dog lots
bark all night – hushed by snow drifts
down the streets. Upturned, a Chevy
lies abandoned in the snow:
shouldering the blows of the Arctic wind.

published in collection "The Appropriate Country",
Waterloo Press, 2001