This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Lakeclean’ by Polly Atkin from her latest collection Much With Body which is a Poetry Book Society Winter Choice.
Much With Body is the startlingly original second collection by poet Polly Atkin. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel, the author’s wild swimming being just one kind of immersion. There is also a distinct link with the past in a central section of found poems taken from transcripts of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.
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Join us online for the virtual launch of Much With Body on Wednesday 20th October from 7pm. Polly will be reading from the collection alongside guest readers Hannah Hodgson, Éireann Lorsung and Claudine Toutoungi. Register for free via Eventbrite www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/186887905757.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘6. That a man approached you in a nightclub’ by Kim Moore from her new collection All The Men I Never Married.
All The Men I Never Married, Kim Moore’s eagerly awaited second collection, is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.
Join us for the hybrid launch of All The Men I Never Married on Friday 15th October. The in person event at Castle Green Hotel in Kendal will be streamed live online. Register through Eventbrite here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/172062632967. Registration for in person tickets closes at 4pm today (8 Oct).
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This week’s Friday Poems is ‘The Romantic’ by Katrina Naomi from her collection The Way the Crocodile Taught Me. Katrina recently won first place in the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize with her poem ‘in the kelp forest’. Watch the winner announcement and listen to a recording of Katrina’s poem on the Keats-Shelly Association website.
The Way the Crocodile Taught Me is a heartfelt and tragi-comic portrayal of a fraught childhood and adolescence. Central to the book are two sequences: one about a quick-tempered stepfather – a 17-stone brute, “mostly in a temper”, and the other about a kindly but also comically old-fashioned grandmother.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Even in dreamscapes’ by Christopher Meredith from his most recent collection Still.
Christopher Meredith’s new poetry collection Still, uses the title word as a fulcrum to balance various paradoxical concerns: stillness and motion, memory and forgetting, sanity and madness, survival and extinction. Lively and thought-provoking, this is a beautifully crafted, humane and intelligent collection.
“Lyrical, always surprising, Meredith ‘fixes stillness’ in absences here. His perfect ear tunes in so precisely – especially to the natural world, it’s ‘edge of sense’ – we are left haunted á la Frost, by a deep lonliness in the human condition.” – Paul Henry
Our Friday Poem this week is ‘How I Hold the World in This Climate Emergency’ by Cath Drake from her debut collection The Shaking City, which is longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2021.
The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake’s debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance. The poet works a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Bocca della Verita’ by Robert Seatter from his new collection The House of Everything. The poems in this collection are all inspired by artefacts and spaces in Sir John Soane’s Museum. Sir John Soane was born on this day in 1753.
Universally captivating, Sir John Soane’s museum in London is a labyrinth of evocation and imagination. In The House of Everything, Robert Seatter conjures it up in a personal and poetic trail, capturing the tragic story of the man who created it and the eclectic collection he gathered within its walls. No matter if you have never visited the place before – the texts are intercut with a series of striking collages made by the poet himself which help to conjure the unique message of this book: how to make material our elusive dreams and imaginings.
On the walls of the Colonnade in Sir John Soane’s Museum is ‘a mouth of truth’ from a Roman fountain, similar to the one that famously features in Roman Holiday, the 1953 film which made a star of the then unknown Audrey Hepburn.
Alison Binney’s pamphlet Other Women’s Kitchens is the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2020.
For me, the kitchen is often the most appealing room in any home. In the house where I grew up, we had a dining table at one end of the lounge, which was only ever used when guests came round. All our other meals were eaten in the kitchen, so all the most interesting, impactful conversations I can remember are located around that small table, in the most intimate space in the heart of the house.
Some of my happiest memories are of cooking with my Mum – first as a small child entrusted with cutting out mince pie lids or stirring jelly cubes into boiling water, and later as an equal, experimenting together with Delia’s latest twists on old favourite recipes. And that kitchen was where the action happened too – the chip pan fire that we put out with a wet tea towel; my Mum’s shrieking encounter with a mouse that leapt from a sack she’d brought in from the garage; the gash from the cheese slicer to which my left thumb still bears witness. So much, also, that was less dramatic but more influential – all those conversations over cooking, over eating together, overheard from the family phone on the kitchen wall.
When I was hunting for a title for my first poetry pamphlet, I was not surprised, then, to be drawn to the final phrase of my poem Every time I came home: ‘dreaming of other women’s kitchens’. This poem recounts a time in my life when I was finding it hard to live up to what I felt were impossible ideals: a time when it seemed as if all my school and university friends, my cousins, and all the children of everyone my parents knew, were getting married, and then having children. Where the family kitchen had always been a space of comfort and camaraderie for me, I no longer felt confident in my place there, uncertain, like so many young gay people, about how my identity as a lesbian might fit with my parents’ expectations of me. The idea of other women’s kitchens, where I might experience an easy acceptance and a sense of fulfilment that I could not otherwise be sure of, felt like a very appealing fantasy.
It struck me, once I looked at the pamphlet through this lens, just how many of the poems in it are located in kitchens, or in kitchen-like spaces, or make reference to food. There’s the makeshift kitchen in a wicker barn where Anne Lister and her partner Ann Walker brew tea and coffee on the last day recorded in Anne Lister’s diary. There are the married women who ‘came home hungry, smelling of lentils’, after their encounters in a supermarket car park. There’s ‘tea with the lady mayoress’ in a found poem sourced from an old edition of the Girl Guide Handbook. And then there’s the kitchen as the location of a first date – probably just the sort of kitchen, complete with ‘individual chocolate mousses’, that my younger, uncertain self would have been delighted to know was waiting for her in the not-too-distant future.
I’m thrilled that the cover for Other Women’s Kitchens, painted so skilfully by Kate Winter, captures the mood as well as the appearance of my parents’ kitchen. I also love the shadowiness of the two superimposed figures, which allows plenty of space for imagination and interpretation. The teapot at the centre represents for me that sense of comfort and companionship integral to the essence of a kitchen – the place not only where significant things happen, but in which, so often, they’re mulled over, digested, poured out.
Alison Binney
Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a gifted new voice who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. The collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading.
This week our Friday Poem is ‘On Wonder Woman’s Island’ by Alison Binney from her debut pamphlet Other Women’s Kitchens which is the winner of the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet competition 2020.
Other Women’s Kitchens is Alison Binney’s debut pamphlet of poems and introduces us to a gifted new voice who writes with flair and feeling about coming out and coming of age as a gay woman in 21st century Britain. The collection explores the challenges of discovering and owning a lesbian identity in the 1980s and 1990s and the joy of finding both love and increased confidence in that identity as an adult. An adroit admixture of the heart-wrenching and the humorous, the book features shaped and ‘found’ pieces, traditional narrative and compact prose poems. Beautifully entertaining, pointedly political and often very funny, Other Women’s Kitchens is essential reading. Seren is thrilled to be presenting this author’s first collected work.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Storyteller’ by Abeer Ameer from her debut collection Inhale/Exile. This poem is also featured in 100 Poems to Save the Earth.
Abeer Ameer writes of her forebears in her first collection, Inhale/Exile. Dedicated to the “holders of these stories”, the book begins with a poem about a storyteller on a rooftop in Najaf, Iraq, follows tales of courage and survival, and ends with a woman cooking food for neighbours on the anniversary of her son’s death.
“…these poems remind us that even in the darkest times, there is light, and there is love.” – Katherine Stansfield
Inhale/Exile is currently half-price in our bank holiday summer sale. Buy before midnight on Monday 30th August and get your copy for just £4.99! Buy now.
Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, co-editors of 100 Poems to Save the Earth, are joining us at Virtual First Thursday on Thursday 2nd September. Tickets are £2.74 (inlc. admin fee) and available through Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/168074853411. We’ll also hear some of the contributors read their poems.
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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Glorious Fellowship of Migraineurs’ by Polly Atkin from her collection Basic Nest Architecture. Polly’s new collection Much With Body is forthcoming this October.
Polly Atkin’s debut poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture, is complex, vivid and moving. It opens with poems inspired by her home in the Lake District, and the landscape and famous Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats, who have walked there and written about the fells and lakes. Nature is a guiding presence, but the author’s personal story, of enduring a little-known and sometimes debilitating illness, is also the backdrop to this striking poetry. Formally, this work is more akin to the metaphysical poets in its fervent use of metaphor, in its multiple layers of meaning and in its quest for answers to the most pressing questions of mortality.
