Ghosts of Nightshifts Past
In a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily Dickinson wrote, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"[i]
This, truly, is the lot of all those of us who take on the role of editing other people’s poetry. We receive missives from poets all around the world who are torn on the twin peaks of worry, that we’ll be just too busy to pay attention to their work, and an urgent need, to know if what they’ve written is any good (at least in our eyes).
We are so grateful, therefore, to the many poets who sent us their work for our July-August submissions window this year. Yours were maybe not fascicles sewn together by hand, but we opened your email attachments with just as much reverence as if they were.
We found something to enjoy in all of your work. Where we were unable to take it forward to our shortlist, we sent back kind words of encouragement (giving feedback is a Dithering Chaps USP), picking out the positives and making suggestions for further development. (David worked as a Teaching Assistant for a while, and ‘three stars and a wish’ is very much his editorial style.)
Our seven shortlisted authors all wowed us with their range, ambition, coherence and poetic verve, so it was really hard to let many of them go.
In the end, though, Gena and I both agreed that the poet we just had to publish was Nicole Durman. Her collection, ‘Ghosts of Nightshifts Past’, is a sensitive yet desensitised, compassionate yet dispassionate depiction of life as an A&E and hospice nurse.
We all stood on our doorsteps and clapped people like Nicole during lockdown. Gena and I went out for a special round of applause after we put down these poems. Though the neighbours maybe thought we’d gone mad, we’re sure you’ll react in the same way when Nicole’s poems are published by Dithering Chaps next year.
What made Nicole’s work speak to us so strongly? We’ll let Emily Dickinson’s answer stand for ours:
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”[ii]
Typically, Emily did not bother with a question mark at the end of this passage. Though Higginson would surely have mentally added one, we are with Emily: there was no question-mark about choosing ‘Ghosts of Nightshifts Past’!
Don’t forget – Dithering Chaps is now open all year round for chapbook submissions. Please click on the submissions tab to find out more...
[i] Letter 260 to TW Higginson, 15th April, 1862
[ii] Letter 342, 16 August 1870