( Mammatus )

Sarah Doyle

( all day she brooded )
( the storm )
( she brooded )
( beneath-the-skin tension )
( gravid )
( with electricity )
( a surface surge )
( meniscus swollen )
( she laboured )
( the storm )
( dumplinged and fertile )
( the parent cloud )
( feathering her nest )
( the nest of cloud )
( she lined her nest )
( the mother cloud )
( with feathers of cumulus )
( the cloud nursery )
( incubator )
( incubating )
( offspring conceived )
( conceived in spasms )
( spasms )
( of ravenous thunder )

The Science

Mammatus clouds are characterised by distinctive bulges protruding from their bases, and are named after the Latin ‘mamma’, meaning ‘breast’. Mammatus clouds generally form in the most unstable cumulonimbus, which often bring thunderstorms. Witnessing (for the first and only time) a mammatus formation on a stormy north Norfolk clifftop at night, I was intrigued by the corporeal quality of these pillowed clouds, arranged in a series of concentric circles around one central cloud. The various bulges appeared to be lit intermittently from within, and the whole formation seemed to heave with a slow volatility, as thunder rumbled in the distance. The sensation of energy created by electrical discharges in the atmosphere was tangible and quite thrilling.

Retrospectively discovering the name and the nature of these clouds, my poet’s imagination conflated the mammatus formation with fertility, conception, and birth, and I was keen to explore these themes via poetic metaphor. In considering the poem’s form, I used parenthesis as a typographical symbol of the rounded cloud-shape; as a means of suggesting the repeating, yet irregular, nature of thunder; and to articulate the containment of energy within the clouds themselves.

The Poet

Sarah Doyle is the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s Poet-in-Residence. She is widely placed and published, winning the Wolverhampton Literature Festival (WoLF) poetry competition and Holland Park Press’s Brexit in Poetry 2019, and being runner-up in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize 2019 and the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize 2020. She was highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2018 and is published in The Forward Book of the Decade 2011-2020. Sarah holds an MA in Creative Writing from UL Royal Holloway College, and is currently researching a PhD in meteorological poetry at Birmingham City University. A pamphlet of poems collaged from extracts of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals – Something so wild and new in this feeling – was published by V. Press in March 2021. More at sarahdoyle.co.uk

Next poem: Binding energy by Marie Wintzer