A tug on your duvet in the middle of the night? It’s a haunting. An embroidered dress, bleached and bitten off by time? A haunting. The light caught in a jar of crabapple jelly may well also be a haunting.
Here’s a ghost poem, where apparitions, presences and replayed histories slip in and out of focus between the lines.
Handbook 06, Tapped by Emily Cooper, is a book-length poem about ghosts – fellow travellers for good or ill.
When I lived in Belfast, my housemate went very woo woo –
she started seeing a psychic every week,
paying £90 a pop.The psychic told her she could heal
her sister’s psychotic break remotely
with some kind of cross-country Reiki technique.Once, she came home and told me
my father’s spirit had been checking in on me.
The psychic said he’d been hanging around the house.I called Mammy to tell her
and she immediately declared it bullshit:
‘Your father hated Belfast, Gerry is here –who do you think turns the immersion off?’
Emily Cooper is a poet and non-fiction writer based in Donegal, Ireland. Her first collection, Glass, was published by Makina Books in 2021. The Conversation, written in collaboration with Jo Burns, was published by Doire Press in 2024. She co-edits The Pig’s Back, a journal publishing short fiction and essays.
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