Here are fifteen poems circumnavigating the world of historical piracy, presented at a slant where the men—such as Calico Jack and Blackbeard—are dangerous, and the women—the likes of Mary Read, Grace O'Malley, Jacquotte Delahaye, Anne Bonny—are lethal. The violence and the sweetness, the freedom and the acceptance of death are all given equal footing. Never straying from the brutality of a lawless life on the seas, Deadly, Delicate welcomes you to the depths…
"You made the pirates feel like people"
Retelling history through poetry in Deadly, Delicate
by Kate Garrett
Combining pirates and poetry in a serious, not-for-kids fashion might seem like a rather niche goal. After all, poetry is a literary form even many avid readers still treat with suspicion, thanks to past school curriculums around the world. As for historical fiction, it’s already a well-established genre in prose and other mediums, so those grown-ups who are interested in pirates already have a wide range of novels, films, even video games at their disposal.
But, as writers do, I had an idea and it snowballed. I started with a poem here and there, about this pirate or that pirate, and became obsessed with turning it into a book. And I hoped to take my own obsessions (poetry, pirates, history) to new audiences—the poetry-shy, the pirate-shy, or the history-shy, depending on who stumbled upon the book and why. I also had specific reasons for using poetry to tell these particular stories.
The romanticised view is of pirates as swashbuckling, freedom-loving rogues, but the historical reality can be just as interesting—possibly even more interesting—than the legends surrounding them. Pirates were human beings with complex lives and thoughts and emotional motivations, just like any of us, and one reason historical fiction exists at all is to give us the people behind the dusty names and dates taught in school. Pirate crews had their own social systems, often resembling democratic socialism, and as individuals were far more diverse—in terms of gender, nationality, race, (dis)ability, sexuality, etc.—than the popular imagination tends to assume.
Part of my focus on the human side of these legendary characters was to include the stories of mostly female pirates. Beyond the most famous names, like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, I also included a few 17th century French-Caribbean buccaneers who predated the Golden Age, like Jacquotte Delahaye, or “Back from the dead Red.” She was so called because she spent several years living as a man—and hiding her bright red hair—having faked her own death. She then returned to her previous identity, very much alive and a woman. It is assumed Jacquotte, who was from a French and Haitian background, took to piracy to support her younger, intellectually disabled brother after their father was murdered, their mother having already died in childbirth. Jacquotte also never married; she was as independent a woman you could ever hope to meet. And for me, a mother of several children and a big sister with many siblings of my own, it made me consider how deeply she must have cared about her brother. This led to my prose poem “Back from the Dead Red,” featured here:
