Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726082
Publication date: February 22, 2021
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726099
Publication date: February 22, 2021
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Restorations is a journey into what it means to preserve – a monument, a moment, a life-story, a poppy. It’s about the hunger to possess and the need to let go. Welding themes from art and history with the contemporary, there are poems about pigments and dictators, glue and glass houses, collections, crinolines, and barometers, and the vagaries of memory itself. Entwined, is a more personal story that tracks the loss of a parent to dementia. Also running through, is a theme of women eroding the straitjacket of gendered roles: we meet a variety of characters including the explorer, Isabella Bird, and the nineteenth century navigator Sarah Jane Rees (Cranogwen) who lived in Llangrannog in Ceredigion. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed.
“No poet I know writes about art with such an intense feeling for its materiality, for smells and textures as well as the nuances of colour. If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork.” – Matthew Francis
“From a discourse on the ingredients of glue to an interrogation of shellac, Rosalind Hudis honours painters, plant collectors and patients who hear ‘morse in the water pipes’ by lovingly restoring stories from remembered fragments. These poems are a masterclass in how to allow the energy at the centre of each poem to open like a concertina until we are engulfed by ‘a whitewash of song’.” – Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Rosalind Hudis reads her poem ‘Shellac’:
Re-watch the online launch of Restorations on our Youtube channel:
Rosalind Hudis
Rosalind Hudis grew up in Suffolk, but after a nomadic period making a living in different countries, and areas, of Britain, settled in West Wales where she has lived for many years with her partner, the puppeteer Tony Heales, and her family. A person of very mixed ethnic background, with roots as far apart as Moldova and Senegal, she finds Wales to be the place that is home. A onetime musician, she has also written from an early age, and now works as a freelance writer, editor, reviewer and tutor. She has taught creative writing at the University if Wales Trinity St David’s Lampeter, and offers writing workshops and readings to community groups or events. She sits on the editorial board of The Lampeter Review.
Besides appearing widely in journals, she has published a pamphlet with Rack Press, Terra Ignota (2013) and a full collection, Tilt, with Cinnamon Press (2014) poetry from which was highly commended in the 2015 Forward prizes. She has won awards in various competitions, including the National Poetry Competition. Rosalind is a Hawthornden Fellow (2017) and the recipient of a Literature Wales Writers bursary in 2013 and 2018. Her poetry often engages with art on the level of physical process, but also landscape, history, and the relationship between objects, freedom, and suppression. These are often the filters through which her work explores more intimate personal relationships.
Her second collection Restorations was published with Seren in February 2021.
“The poems in Hudis’s most recent collection, Restorations, confirm her as a poet of the physical, of the infinite details of the world as it presents itself to us through our senses: sounds, shapes, textures, colors, odors—particularly odors, which to my mind are too often lacking in contemporary poetry.”
Nicola Vulpe, The Manhattan Review
“An unsettling and ambitious collection by a powerful, restless poetic voice.”
Steven Lovatt, The Friday Poem
“This is an intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking collection. Hudis works in a variety of forms, some experimental; often her challenging lineation keeps the reader intrigued. These richly-textured poems repay several readings in order to uncover the layers within. The reader, like the restorer, uncovers fresh layers with each return to the work.”
Pamela Johnson, London Grip
“There is a great deal of ekphrastic verse being written currently, it seems, much of it simply exercises in description. What makes Hudis’ work different to most is an intense engagement with the materiality of the painter’s (and the restorer’s) art … In these poems of loss, Hudris extends her concerns for restoration by applying her tools and materials to the lost parents, returning them to a kind of new life through her words. It’s an impressive achievement.”
Billy Mills, Elliptical Movements
“This incredible collection from Hudis is an expertly curated, visually transformative delve into the viscera, emotion and obsession of art restoration. Hudis somehow finds infinite ways of exploring the subtle science and agonising art that goes into bringing paintings back from the dead. And it is this personification of the subjects, the metamorphosis of restorer to surgeon, seducer and saviour that makes these poems so immediate and so fascinating.”
John-Paul Davis, Buzz Magazine
