Where did Mr and Mrs Philpott first come from? The author (and HappenStance editor), Helena Nelson, has no idea. They popped into her head over twenty years ago and refused to go away. Their story is one of ordinary, difficult, everyday love. But they themselves aren’t ordinary.
This is a big book, compiled over two decades. Some of the poems have appeared in previous volumes by the same author. Mrs Philpott’s hair on the jacket, although you can’t see this in the web page, is silver.
Available here at a reduced price for HappenStance customers: £8.00. (Or you can buy it for £12.00 on Amazon.)
COMMUNICATION
Philpott speaks the language of sighs
which is a language of pure emotion
made only of air
and the language of sighs is not his wife’s language—
she doesn’t speak it but learns to interpret
the tiniest nuance,
the smallest verb of the glossary
of the language of men whose deepest feeling
is too raw for words,
too naked for clothing, although her husband
(whose eloquence is never in doubt)
doesn’t know what he says,
what his heart gives away, as his breath expresses
his sorrow, his fear, his rage, his loss
and even his love.
