product_data
Other Beasts
| £7.99 |
From the first sumptuous poem, ‘Birthday’ where the protagonist, running at night, thinks of her body as a “nocturnal bloom”, the reader is immersed in the compelling voice of Sarah Corbett. From her first book, The Red Wardrobe, nominated for both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prize, we are familiar with the world she portrays, of the childhood spent in rural North Wales, and the first half of this new collection is devoted mostly to poems that re-create scenes from a youth that was haunted by trouble, but also redeemed by a strong attachment to the beauties of nature, particularly horses, and an early love of reading and culture. In poems like ‘Rivers, Roads’ the two images mesh and intertwine, becoming symbolic and strangely evocative.
This poet bravely eschews lightness and irony for a whole-heartedly passionate and intensely physical response to life. Other Beasts differs from her earlier work in that in the latter half of the collection, she moves away from her own personal history and focuses on in-depth and often scary narratives of other lives. In these poems, such as ‘dreaming history’ she closely identifies with survivors of trauma, in this case the horror of a small girl hiding in a trunk while her family is massacred in a war-torn country. In the long poem ‘Testimony’ she inhabits the voice of Joanne Lees, the woman at the centre of the famously controversial case in Australia where her partner, Peter Falconio, was murdered and she managed, although tied up, to escape into the bush. Another sequence, ‘Cuttings’ weaves a week’s worth of international press cuttings together,creating an alternately horrible, sad, funny and odd tapestry of events.
Sarah Corbett was born in Chester, raised in north Wales, and educated at the Universities of Leeds and East Anglia. This is her third book of poems, following the acclaimed The Red Wardrobe (1998) and The Witch Bag (2002). She has published her poems in a wide selection of magazines and anthologies and has read her work at festivals internationally.
Listen to Sarah Corbett read her poem, ‘Killer Whales on a Beach in Fiji’:
Comments
Review from The North
Sarah Corbett's work is also familiar to me but, despite the recurrence of subject matter and imagery (the natural world, animals, parents for example) there are new departures in her third collection in terms of both subject and approach. The collection opens with poems about star-gazing, enriched by powerful use of imagery. In 'Sky Watching' the narrator 'watches the sky unleash the long whip/of its mountains, its river's black ribbons' and in 'Comet', a lovely poem about walking at night over Fountains Fell, 'The god was hammering out stars' and 'Hale-Bopp was a fist of flung glitter'. It was taken by the clarity and richness of language in both poems
I particularly liked two haunting poems about a child's experience of death. The natural world has always furnished Corbett with some of her most powerful images and this collection is no exception. Among the 'beasts' are horses, dogs, fox, stoat, rabbit' reindeer, hare, wolf but my favourite is 'Killer Whales on a Beach in Fiji' in which the speaker joins in watering, wrapping and handling beached whales and revels in this 'midwifery' by moonlight. The power of the whales is beautifully evoked in a very tactile poem which explores 'the boundary between worlds'.
Corbett's predilection for the macabre makes her the perfect to tackle the re-imagining of chilling events ad 'Testimony', a long poem about the murder of Pete Falconio in Australia in 2002 has an eerie power because of the imagined experience of the victims.
Carole Bromley The North