Event

9th October
3 Essex Poets, Big Day of Poetry at Cramphorn Theatre.

Bio

Victor Tapner has won several major poetry awards, including first prize in the Cardiff International Competition and Scotland’s Wigtown. A series of his dramatic monologues won The New Writer 2008 poetry collection prize, and he is included in the Bloodaxe anthology The Honey Gatherers.
His first full-length collection Flatlands – an East Anglian prehistory cycle - is scheduled to come out in September from Salt, and he is currently completing a second. A former Financial Times journalist, he is now a full-time writer.
He lives in Essex.

Poem

Thames Idol

A scarred hand carved my buttocks
scraped my spine
made thin hips to cup a man

I stood at the back of a quiet hut
In famine they brought me food
in spring they sang for rain

At last they gave me to the river
a bigger god than I
Earth pressed my breasts

Now I cheat the rot of leaves
Black water fills my eyes
frost cracks my grained flesh

Your hand will draw me from the mud
Find me in your own time
find me in your own face