Poetry
Winner of the Mslexia magazine pamphlet competition, poet Ilse Pedler often writes from her perspective as a working Veterinary Surgeon. From her earliest days as a student of Applied Zoology at Bangor University, where she worked with hill sheep and had to visit an abattoir in Caernarfon, she has been involved at close-quarters with animals.
Her deep knowledge and genuine love of them informs this art, from the first poem ‘The Complete Science’ where the poet remembers her days as a student in Anatomy classes at Cambridge, and contrasts the formal scientific nomenclature: ‘I clung to Miller’s dissection guide like my first alphabet…’ with her working life: ‘a theatre with a different audience’ and replete with ‘knowledge of the skin’s elasticity, its unexpected warmth’.
Not only does the author observe animals and capture their moods and characteristics, such as the “rat dart” of a terrier, or the “rhythmic, grunting lullaby” of a sow, she also observes the human behavior, sometimes poignant, often comic, in her surgery: “I’m listening when he growls and you say ‘don’t worry, he won’t bite you’ / I’m listening when he tries to bite me.”
A secondary theme is secrets: those we keep from others, those we keep from ourselves, those nature keeps from us, as in ‘Suturing Secrets’, where observation becomes also a meditation on the paradox of the beauty of damaged flesh: “We are divided into compartments,/separated by taught membranes,/glistening planes of connective tissue, resilient boundaries.”
The poet is adept in both formal and ‘experimental’ free measures. ‘The Importance of Air’ is a narrative sestina that reflects the awful repetition of factory farming. ‘Final Drawings’ is a beautifully-judged sonnet, an elegy to a friend. Readers will appreciate the intelligence and dynamism of the poetic talent on display in Ilse Pedler’s The Dogs that Chase Bicycle Wheels.
Ilse Pedler
Ilse Pedler is a poet and veterinary surgeon. She lives and works in The Lake District trying to juggle writing with the unpredictability of sick animals. She has also been a Morris dancer for over 30 years and no longer tries to hide it.
She has had poems published previously in many magazines including, Stand, Magma, Poetry News, and several anthologies. She was shortlisted in The Rialto Nature Poetry competition in 2014 and 2015 and in the Bridport prize 2016 and commended in the Hippocrates 2017. She is the winner of the 2015 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition. Her pamphlet, The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels was published by Seren in March 2016. She was long listed in the National Poetry Competition in 2018. She lives and works as a Veterinary Surgeon in Grange over Sands near Kendal. Her first collection, Auscultation, was published by Seren in 2021
“I bring my experience as a practising veterinary surgeon to my poetry, writing about our relationships with animals and how they impact on our lives. In my poems I let you into the secrets of the consulting room, operating theatre and farm; the equipment, the techniques and the rituals and hierarchy. You are permitted access to the functioning of bodies and their failings and invited to wonder at insides laid bare during surgical procedures.
In Auscultation, I also explore the idea of listening and being listened to through poems about motherhood and my experience of being a step mother. The fairy tales of my childhood found their way into some of these poems; queens, castles and three wishes interweaving with the contemporary challenges of step parenting and blended families. In these poems I interrogate the importance of the types of care we give and receive.”
