Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854115119
Publication date: February 22, 2010
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854116154
Publication date: February 22, 2010
Price: £6.39
Out of stock
Shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First Collection of Poetry 2010.
This debut collection from Seren, Inroads, showcases a startling new talent. Carolyn Jess-Cooke has a sophisticated poetic intelligence as well as a great sense of fun.
The opening piece, ‘Accent’ where ‘stowaway inflections and locally-produced slang/have passports of their own’ is a praise poem for the versatility and joy of language, “The way sound chases itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory…”. This verbal fluency and dexterity are employed to offer us poems that are multi-faceted and often paradoxical. ‘Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube’ is part satire, part tender re-enactment of the myth, featuring the most up-to-date media platforms.
After this playful start, a difficult childhood is evoked through metaphor in poems like ‘Music Lesson’,‘One Thousand Painful Pieces’ and ‘Bitten’, all the more heartbreaking for being indirect. Other high points are ‘Newborn’ with the apt description of a babe in arms being a ‘zoo of verbs/mewling, snuffling, pecking…’. This sweet realism again gives way to metaphor, in the strangely evocative ‘Dorothy’s Homecoming’ in a brilliant take on the classic film ‘Wizard of Oz’, the power of maternal love has turned into a ‘twister’.
Readers will enjoy discovering this striking and versatile new voice.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Carolyn Jess-Cooke was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her PhD resulted in her first book, Shakespeare and Film, and kicked off an early career in academia. She is currently Senior Lecturer and Programme Convenor for the MLitt Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Carolyn’s first poetry collection, Inroads (Seren) received a Northern Writers Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie prize, an Arts Council Award, and was shortlisted for the New London Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 2010. Her second collection BOOM! explores her experiences of motherhood and received a K Blundell award from the Society of Authors and a Northern Writers Award. She edited the bestselling anthology Writing Motherhood.
Carolyn has a prestigious parallel career as a novelist. Her first novel The Guardian Angel’s Journal was published in 23 languages and was an international bestseller, her subsequent titles: The Boy Who Could See Demons, I Know My Name, and The Blame Game all did very well. The last two sold as film/TV options. Her novel, The Nesting, set in Norway, was published Harper Collins/Random House in 2020. Her most recent novel The Light House Witches was published with HarperCollins in 2021.
