Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854114617
Publication date: February 7, 2008
Price: £8.99
Out of stock
Quietly persuasive and formally adept, the poems in Kathryn Simmonds’ first collection engage with both the quotidian and the transcendental. Often in urban or suburban settings, her protagonists struggle with mundane tasks such as cooking or commuting or office work – all of the obstacles of modernity – and then, by some shift of attention, or by some keen narrowing of focus, they chance upon the surreal or the spiritual.
This is a poetry of subtle contexts and allusions, as much as concerned with the vulnerability of the body as for the fate of the soul and the idea of ´keeping faith´ in God and life.
What the critics say…
“An expansive imagination, a wide formal range, wit and humanity – ´Sunday at the Skin Laundrette´ is a remarkable debut.” – Michael Symmons Roberts
“Quirky, witty, moving Kathryn Simmonds´ gift is to find joy and beauty in unexpected places. She invests the everyday world with an extraordinary luminosity.” – Jackie Kay
“This playful and knowing first collection is fuelled throughout by a strong sense of lyricism” – The Guardian
Listen to Kathryn Simmonds read her poem, ‘The Woman Who Worries Herself to Death’:
Kathryn Simmonds
Kathryn Simmonds’ first book of poetry Sunday at the Skin Launderette won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2008. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Love and Fallout is her first novel and was a finalist in the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize before it was published. In 2013-14 she was the first poet-in-residence at the Charles Causley Trust in Launceston, Cornwall.
