Victoria Adukwei Bulley

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Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a British-born Ghanaian poet, writer, and filmmaker who was shortlisted for the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2016 and received an Eric Gregory Award for her pamphlet Girl B, published as part of the New Generation African Poets series in 2017. An alumna of both the Barbican Young Poets and Octavia Poetry Collectives, as well as a Complete Works and Instituto Sacatar fellow, Bulley has held residencies internationally in the US, Brazil, and the V&A. In 2019, she was awarded a TECHNÄ’ scholarship for fully-funded doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London; and in 2022 her debut collection, Quiet, circling around ideas of Black interiority, intimacy and selfhood, will be published by Faber. Bulley is also the director of MOTHER TONGUES, an intergenerational poetry, film and translation project exploring the indigenous linguistic heritages of poets of colour, supported by Autograph and Arts Council England. Source

There You Are

There you are

this cold day

boiling the water on the stove

pouring the herbs into the pot

hawthorn, rose;

buying the tulips

& looking at them, holding

your heart in your hands at the table

saying please, please to nobody else

here in the kitchen with you.

How hard, how heavy this all is.

How beautiful, these things you do,

in case they help, these things you do

which, although you haven’t said it yet,

say that you want to live.

Published:

2022

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Mental Health

Poems of the Everyday

Strength & Resilience

Literary Devices:

Anadiplosis

A device in which the last word or phrase of one clause, sentence, or line is repeated at the beginning of the next.

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Pleonasm

the use of more words than necessary to express meaning, redundancy