An afternoon spent at Cirencester’s Corinium Museum was the inspiration behind this month’s poem ‘Women Exhibited’ by Sophie Livingston.
Sophie said: ‘I was asking myself about the lack of stories about women in history. As I looked at the Bronze-Age and Anglo-Saxon graves of women on show in the museum it struck me that it was the women’s bones that were telling their story. The exhibiting of the women, splayed out in the cases seemed a kind of violation – but it also made them visible and present to me in a way women in history are usually denied. I wanted to explore the sense that they were speaking to me through time in the only way available. It was intimate, and their bones were beautiful – and yet it was a kind of degradation too.’
The trip to the museum was organised by Cirencester-based poetry group ‘Wordbrew’. ‘Women Exhibited’ is featured in ‘Off the Wall’ an anthology of poetry and prose by Somewhere Else Writers, available to buy on Amazon.
Somewhere Else Writers Group 