Jessica Traynor

Lydia 
 
 
Draw some cards for me, wherever you are.
I know we don’t talk much these days 
but I’ve been thinking about the time 
you set your college dorm on fire 
and came to live with us.
Now, I’m trying your tactics – 
I set a fire inside myself.
It’s cleared space and my halls 
are black-lacquered & echoing. The problem is,
I don’t like the new tenants.
Inside me is a great tall house,
all clapboard and dead ivy.
Why don’t you and I play ghosts,
why don’t you and I play girls no one can touch.
Draw three cards for me, tell me how it goes.
 
 
—————
 
 
Bog Virgin
After The Butcher Boy by Pat McCabe
 
 
Once I walked the road in a blue dress 
and a poet told me 
I looked like the virgin mary,
 
so that was me then, stella maris
sitting with him in the seafood restaurant
eating chowder, clams and mussels 
 
sluicing down my throat.
The poet told me I should write from my cunt 
because paddy kavanagh never did
 
and look what happened to him.
Then he took me back to the bog,
told me to ignore the little men 
 
crawling in apocalyptic clay – 
keep your eye trained on the mystic beyond, 
he said, forcing me onto my knees.
 
and if they hurt you, write your curses onto them 
till they shrivel like salted slugs.
So there I was, kneeling in ditchwater,
 
writing hexes and levitating as required 
but only when the sun came out,
which wasn’t often. Today
 
I’m really here to say,
the bad world is out there, lydia,
pushing in around us 
 
and packing up our lungs.
you’d better rub their slurry on your face
till you blend in because right now
 
I can see the devil in you a mile off – 
can see it pulling up from within 
some great bog leviathan, 
 
trailing priests and poets 
who want to drown us both
in its wet centre.
 
 
—————
 
 
i’m lydia deetz and all my friends are dead
 
 
        thanks for welcoming me to the circle
i didn’t think it would end like this. even though
        i asked for it by wearing black. by wearing a veil
(demon thirst trap) by hanging around
        this older man. i swear he had charisma.
ok. he saw me like no one else ever
        saw me. even if that means that he saw himself
in every mirror i looked into.
        someone has to mind the strays.
girls are so afraid of maggots. grave worms.
        black eyes. 
what’s in it for me? well, I’m still here. 
        and I’m getting better. a lady in the chelsea market
read my aura, told me to trust my instinct, not my brain.
        how do i know which is talking? i asked.
the instinct doesn’t negotiate, she said,
        the mind and its problems are all this red tulle – 
she pointed to my wedding dress – 
        this indigo light at your throat is the truth, she said,
running her fingers along my rope burn.
 
 
—————
 
 
Movie Night with Lydia
 
I  Becoming Catwoman

 
My mother was a secretary like Selina Kyle,
before Christopher Walken pushed her out a window – 
(Selina, not my mother). My seven-year-old self
watches her body slam through awnings
(not my mother’s body, but Selina’s),
splatting onto Tim Burton’s snowy alleyway.
Then the cats envelop her like the fur coat 
that hung in the wardrobe at home, the one 
she always said was suspiciously tabby-striped
(my mother, not Selina) and they lick and lick her
and somehow this reknits her shattered spine,
her arms and legs swivel into place, but her glasses,
her large owl-eye glasses (my mother’s and Selina’s)
are smashed and this is the worst, just the worst day – 
pushed out the window! By a man with 
a bad wig no one mentions because bosses 
can look stupid while pushing women out of skyscrapers 
and it’s like, ugh, bad day at the office. 
And up she gets and makes her way home 
to her little girl apartment so we can see 
she’s just been playing at being a woman – 
she’s built herself a toyshop to get lost in,
(Selina, not my mother) and she splatters the walls  
with black paint, smashing toys, and as a little girl
(me, not my mother, not Selina) this is just devastating, 
because it feels like we aren’t allowed 
to have anything soft – 
no knitted kittens or kit-cat klocks – 
because it makes us weak and the only way to stop
men with Struwwelpeter hair
from pushing us out of skyscrapers
(me, my mother, Selina) is by killing 
everything we love so that no one else can.
 
 

I

10 The Hive, xxiii
11 Lydia…
12 Bog Virgin
14 monstera
15 and the girl inside me
16 Satanic Panic
17 Roger Moore’s Swimming Pool
18 i’m lydia deetz and all my friends are dead
19 Lydia Reads the Cards
20 He Gets Her the Cloths of Heaven
21 The Liar, xxiv
22 Becoming Schrödinger’s Cat
23 Ezekiel 47:11
24 Queen of Cups
28 The Conductor, xxv
29 Movie Night with Lydia
34 Lydia Reads the Cards
35 dear (name)
38 Your unifying theory of everything
39 The Mistress, xxvi
40 The Tower
41 The Marishes
42 I’m Quartered
44 Sheila on the Red Bed
45 Magpie
46 The Scientist, xxvii
 
II 
48 The Glacier, xxviii
49 The Fool
50 The drunk psychotherapist dooms you at the party
51 Movie Night with Lydia
56 I’ve Been Meaning to Say, Lydia
62 Lydia Reads the Cards
63 Entre des bois et des plages sauvages
64 Tiger
65 Putting My Arms Around the Goat
66 In the Night Garden
67 A kid tells my daughter her storybook is broken
68 Allegory
69 Villanelle Villanelle
70 The Keeners
71 I Read the Cards
72 The Thief, xxix
73 what the women are doing
74 Junk File of Incorrect Predictions
75 The Algorithm, xxx
76 Rabbits
77 The Good Girls, xxxi
78 The Steak
79 The nights I don’t think about you
80 Parachute Malfunction
81 Always Eating Your Dad
82 King of Wands (Reversed)
83 The New Moon, xxxii
84 Well-behaved
85 A reading for the dead
86 to you, one year on
87 Ten of Swords
88 lydia…
89 On Halloween
 
93 Acknowledgements
94 Thanks
95 Notes
 

‘It is that strong sense of uncanniness throughout Jessica Traynor’s Pit Lullabies that marks it with distinction. The eponymous Pit Lullabies – there are 10 in total – form a wild, exhilarating backbone to this collection where bone is a key word.  A book about motherhood and birth trauma… its roots are firmly entrenched in the natural world… Traynor’s poems, like those of Walter de la Mare, are most deadly when they are pared back, almost child-like.’ – Martina Evans, The Irish Times

'Fierce and profound, Pit Lullabies is one of the vital books of the new Irish poetry.' – Ciarán O’Rourke, New Hibernia Review

‘It’s a beautiful meditation on, among other themes, new parenthood, violence against women, and the destruction of the environment.’ – Liadán Hynes, Sunday Independent

‘But while it may be dark stuff… the language is also wonderful: gothic, Anglo-Saxon, visceral, and well, exhilarating. It’s also attentive to both the tender and the subterranean emotions that arise with the experience of motherhood. More than that, Pit Lullabies harks back to knowledge from ancient times, reminding us of our innate powers as women and as life-givers.’ – Afric McGlinchey, Dublin Review of Books

'Addressing a daughter over a period stretching from foetal scan to birth and beyond, she is broadly concerned with the value as well as the control of darkness. “Try to be the shape that holds the dark,” she advises at the end of 'Pit Lullaby IX'. This exhumation and valuing of the dark may be connected with the breaking of silence and the exposure of institutionalised forms of maternal and child abuse that have been the Irish writer’s preoccupations in some of her previous work. Darkness exhumed, like silence broken, becomes a bright and vital force.' – Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week, The Guardian, on Pit Lullabies

'Traynor's poems lurk in.. liminal spaces between light and dark, joy and fear, real and imagined, so that the world is unsettled and unsettling.' – Jenna Clake, Poetry London, on Pit Lullabies

‘Ireland, where I’m from, is not short of great writers… In poetry, there were standout works from Jessica Traynor in Pit Lullabies and Victoria Kennefick’s Eat or We Both Starve.’ – Sinéad Gleeson, The Guardian (Books enjoyed in June 2022)

'I’ve been moved by Jessica Traynor’s mothering poems in Pit Lullabies – intricate, thought-provoking and delightful.' – Nuala O’Connor, The Irish Times (Best books of 2022 so far)

‘Some of our best-known poets, such as Jessica Traynor and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, also released new collections. Traynor’s Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe) and Ní Churreáin’s The Poison Glen (Gallery) were both concerned with incantation, hexing, history and womanhood, though each is a distinct and urgent voice in their own right.’ – Martina Evans & Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times (The best new poetry of 2022)

‘This year saw so much stellar Irish writing: Polluted Sex, short stories by Lauren Foley, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples, Edel Coffey’s thriller Breaking Point (all novels), Jessica Traynor’s poetry collection Pit Lullabies…’ – Sinéad Gleeson, The Irish Times (Books of the Year 2022, Writers’ Favourites)

‘What a brilliant year for poetry! I am very much enjoying Jessica Traynor’s third collection, Pit Lullabies which is witty, wicked and moving in equal measure.’ – Victoria Kennefick, RTE Culture (cultural picks)

'I’ve long admired Jess Traynor’s poetry, which is as confident being serious and historical, as it is when it’s arch and playful. There’s a tenderness to how Traynor writes about motherhood, the body, the places we find ourselves. Her new collection Pit Lullabies proves that she’s one of our finest poets, moving through myths, love, and the environment. It’s a visceral work that I know I’ll go back to again and again.' – Sinéad Gleeson, Dubray Books blog:  Irish Writers Recommend Books by Irish Women

'Traynor’s style is forthright, yet also allusive, at times employing shock tactics as an opportunity for philosophical musings, encouraging the reader to experience these poems multiple times.' – Lind Grant-Oyeye, Poetry Ireland Review

‘Here an acerbic wit is fused with ruminations on the female body along with the concerns of early parenthood… Traynor’s sound is effortlessly hypnotic, her language formed, deliberate and lyrical.’ – Anthony Anaxagorou, Poetry Book Society selector

‘While environmental crisis mounts in the background and modern life pulses forward, Pit Lullabies traces the arc from birth to infancy and toddlerdom as a much-wanted child ages on a planet that teeters toward catastrophe. Confronting the difficult realities of birth and its aftermath, the tension between the newly born and Earth’s dead end builds slowly as Pit Lullabies tries to reconcile the gift of mothering with the fact of having “brought you / to this world of always evening, always leaving,” (“The Signs”).’ – Shara Lessley, West Branch