MATT BRYDEN

CENTRES OF GRAVITY

I try to lift my head from her crib,

with its skewed soft toys hung from a rail,

and transfer my thoughts elsewhere.

My eyes and neck won’t let me.

No dispensation has me break my watch.

Holding her close to feel her breath

I cannot see her, though she seizes

the arm of my glasses with articulacy, arrests

the drop of a bib by its green silk ribbon

in a fist she releases only

with difficulty; a feat of instinct –

like Mabel covering the fields as a puppy.

BIOGRAPHY

Matt Bryden is a poet and teacher living in Somerset, England. His pamphlet *Night Porter*, which documents life in a Yorkshire hotel, won the Templar prize in 2010, while his first collection *Boxing the Compass* was launched at Keats House. In 2018, his *Lost and Found* project won a *Literature Matters* Award from the Royal Society of Literature and in 2019 he won the William Soutar Prize and the Charroux Memoir Prize. Matt has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College and runs the Somerset Young Poets Competition. www.mattbryden.co.uk