Attention Comes First, by Irmgard (Irmi) Willcockson

Poetry, chapbook, 20 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

“Pay attention!” exhorts a parent, a teacher, a lover. “Pay attention” invites the live oak tree, the paper wasp, the pond. Attention comes before, before knowledge, before skill, before care, before love. “Paying attention” comes with a price. It costs time, thoughts, and emotions. The poems in this chapbook pay attention to the grand, the inconvenient, the overlooked, the hopeful.

The trajectory of the poems in Attention Comes First ranges from harm inflicted by nature to nature’s indifference towards humans to harm perpetrated by humans against nature, and finally to hopeful glimpses of a different future. While written out of a deep connection to the Coastal Prairies and Marshes of the Gulf Coast and the city of Houston, the themes explored in these poems apply across lands and seasons.

Irmgard (Irmi) Willcockson is a place-based poet living and writing in Houston, Texas. She holds an undergraduate degree in Biology from the University of California at Los Angeles and a PhD from Baylor College of Medicine. She is an immigrant, wife, naturalist, parent, writer, nature journaler, volunteer. Irmi is a part of Houston’s poetry ecosystem. Powered by ADD, she reads and writes short poems. Thinking about poets that inspire her makes her realize that there are too many to list. Her poems have been published in Equinox and Solace (fws). Attention Comes First is her first chapbook.