Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 60
ISBN: 9781781724095
Publication date: April 27, 2017
Price: £9.99
‘Full of wit, fun, talent’ – Artemis Poetry
‘Blewitt draws us in with her keen eye for quirkiness, a good ear for dialogue and her riotous delight in all things absurd.’ – Maria Apichella, The Poetry School
‘Here is a riotous, cacophonous and wonderful book. Here is an important new voice in British poetry.’– Jonathan Edwards, author of My Family and Other Superheroes.
This Is Not a Rescue is the eagerly-awaited debut collection from Emily Blewitt. These poems move in various registers, keyed to their subject-matter. There are pieces that take a playful approach to the author’s native Wales (‘How to Explain Hiraeth to an Englishman’, ‘How to Marry a Welsh Girl’) which resist cliché by subverting our expectations. Similarly, there are several sharp, satirical poems about modern office life; these paint a familiar scene, redolent of boredom and lechery (‘When I Think of Bald Men’, ‘The Question’).
The author’s coolly intelligent wit is to the fore in ‘Devouring Jane’, which updates Jane Austen’s heroes for a 21st-century Elizabeth Bennet. There are also a number of instructional poems, survival guides for the modern heroine: ‘Woman Poet’, ‘Self-Defence’, ‘Things My Dance Teacher Used to Say’. These contrast with some intensely personal lyrics that touch on childhood trauma, on depression, on sexual and domestic violence (‘When in Recovery’, ‘Sometimes I Think of Chapel’, ‘Forgiveness’). The revealing honesty of these pieces makes for compelling reading.
There are also poems inspired by popular culture, for a TV and internet-saturated age: ‘The Walking Wed’, ‘On Watching Paranormal Witness’, ‘Boba Fett and the Sarlacc’.
Perhaps most striking, however, are the number of startlingly beautiful love poems: ‘The Philobrutist’, ‘I Threw Myself at You’, ‘We Broke Up’, ‘Navigation Points’. Often a poem will initially seem to be about a landscape or an animal – say, a bird (‘Honeyguide’) – but this ostensible subject matter is a mere prelude to subtle declarations of passion, of yearning, of desire.
Also here are two sequences: one inspired by crows, and the other by a favourite cat. The author’s appealingly wry, thoughtful manner, a delightfully circuitous wit, and her pointed intelligence, make this book one of the best and most entertaining debuts you are likely to read this year.
Emily Blewitt
Emily Blewitt was born in Carmarthen, Wales. She read English Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (2004-2007), and has an MA in Film and Literature from the University of York (2009). She recently completed a PhD at Cardiff University, where her doctoral research explored the poetic representations of pregnancy by women writers from the nineteenth century to the present day. She has published poetry in The Rialto, Ambit, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter’s House, Furies, Hinterland, Brittle Star, and Cheval. The title poem from her new Seren collection, This Is Not a Rescue, was Highly Commended in the 2017 Forward Prize anthology.
