Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781727362
Publication date: February 26, 2024
Price: £9.99
“Celebratory and elegiac, of a succulent, strange natural world.” – Christopher Meredith
Elizabeth Parker’s second collection explores its titular bird from all angles: from diving cormorants to cormorants in flight, cormorants in motion and also in stillness. The bird itself is always untameable and irreducible to human impressions, but is bound through poetry with a family history, legacy, and losses.
The cormorant is the present and the past, both part of and beyond these human stories. It can be an omen, the devil, the enemy of anglers, or perhaps just an elusive subject watched by humans.
Family is a key focus of this collection. Parker traces the journeys of her ancestors from Ireland to Liverpool docks and from The Midlands, the bloodlines meeting in London, the family then moving to The Forest of Dean and, finally, the poet starting her own family in Bristol. Parker plays close attention to the city and its inhabitants, human or more-than-human. There is a powerful depth to place here, which is full of carefully observed details about an independent natural world and how humans interact with it.
Sequences, repetition, and echoes are original techniques used to circle around the collection’s main themes. Poems of small joys are balanced by grief, for example in poems about a father suffering dementia, and by the theme of loss generally. The book is dedicated to the poet’s late sister, the playwright Helen K. Parker.
Through examinations of nature and the human, of shared losses and histories, Parker shows us how to regard the world compassionately. As she considers the miracle of the cormorant, she reminds us of the importance of wonder, offering an uplifting antidote to difficult times.
Elizabeth Parker
Elizabeth Parker grew up in the Forest of Dean, attended Monmouth Comprehensive School in Wales and currently lives on the harbour in Bristol. She has a BA First Class Hons in English Literature and Creative Writing from Warwick University, an MA in Mythology from Bristol and also has a PGCE in English Secondary Teaching. She has published widely in magazines and has a poetry pamphlet, Antinopolis. She has won and been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the Bridport, Melita Hume, Troubadour International, and Gregory O’Donoghue awards. Parker is also a member of The Spoke Bristol poetry group who perform their work at festivals and events. her debut poetry collection In Her Shambles was published in 2018. Her second collection, Cormorant, is being published by Seren in February 2024.
John Forth, London Grip
“Accomplished and artful, heartfelt and addressing themes such as family and loss, Cormorant is a marvellous second collection of new poetry from Elizabeth Parker.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
“In this collection, the cormorant acts as an omen, a comfort, a guide and a totem. These immersive, sensory poems transport readers to hills, rivers, cathedrals, and seaside places. These imagistic pieces flit between the past and present too, speaking to connection—with family, friends, animals and the natural world—but also to anticipation and loss. The sun is ever present but set against the darkness: ‘a black you could sink everything into.’ This is a book that calls you back and asks what it means to be alive.”
Christina Thatcher
“Plunging through story and memory, ocean and ponds, shadow and the ‘momentary angling of light waves’, Parker’s poems surface with a haul of truths that are dark and dazzling.”
Deborah Harvey
“Parker reveals herself as a poet of the second glance; an explorer of the variations created by an attentive mind. And always, never more than a few poems away, is a cormorant just out of reach, at home in two alien elements – air and water. Her cormorants carry what sometimes feels like a message but may be something harder to describe: the feeling of something glimpsed; of our own imperfect understanding.”
Tom Sastry
“Deeply felt work, gleaming occasionally with moments of lyric intensity, that moves between and enmeshes a very personal poetry of first names, of the intimately domestic, and a sometimes incantatory evocation, both celebratory and elegiac, of a succulent, strange natural world.”
Christopher Meredith
