Jean Bleakney

Jean Bleakney Poems

Jean Bleakney Biography

Jean Bleakney was born in Newry, Co. Down and now lives in Belfast where she works in a garden centre. She studied biochemistry at Queen’s University, Belfast, and only turned to writing in her 30s, after the birth of her children. Her developing passion for poetry coincided with a developing passion for horticulture – many of her poems concern themselves with plants and the symbolic associations – and paradoxes – of gardens. Bleakney was commissioned to design the garden at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s. Every plant is a reference to poetry, and, like Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, the result is a garden which is also simultaneously, somehow, a poem. She has published two collections of poetry, The Ripple Tank Experiment (1999) and The Poet’s Ivy (2003), both from Lagan Press, and is currently working on a third.)

The Best Poem Of Jean Bleakney

Deduction

Not the whitefly, nor the vine weevil,
nor the mealy bug, nor the scale insect,
nor woolly aphid, nor other viviparous aphid,
nor spider mite, nor any sap-sucker per se
but rather, one senses, the leaf miner
- lover of lamellae and interstices;
burrower between the host leaf's
top and bottom sheets - yes,
the leaf miner, with its green-tinted
soft-focus view of the garden;
engineer of the long and winding
blister of its own meanderings...
least among pests, the leaf miner is surely
the apprentice poet of the piece.

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