After You Were, I Am

By Camille Ralphs

by Jonathan Wooding 17th January 2025

Camille Ralphs is clairaudient. Like a necromancer, she conjures the voices of our tragic ancestors. In her long poem, ‘Malkin: An Ellegy in 14 Spels’, the defeated, the dishonoured, the hounded and harassed step forward and speak across the ravages of time, and the wasteland, too, of abandoned dialects and forgotten words. Here’s one Isabel Robey, her love lost, misunderstood, accused of witchcraft in 1612, and running to save her neck – haring off, as witches do, naked into the forest: