Restorations

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Friday Poem – ‘What the Burglar Took’ by Rosalind Hudis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘What the Burglar Took’ by Rosalind Hudis from her collection Restorations. You can hear Rosalind chatting about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows an abstract print of some mountains tinged with hints of blue, red and purple. The text reads: Restorations, Rosalind Hudis.

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. Linking all is a play with colour, particularly blue, in all its stages from vital to decayed.

What the Burglar Took That night it was nothing. Cinematic, he’d slid under the kitchen window, swerved an old veined saucer, rocked the vintage cactus, slippered his way across tiles on a moulting rug that still smelt of your last dog and made you wheeze. After that threshold no sign, yet you felt him in every omission the carriage clock that paced him but never chimed, silverfish partying by moonlight who’d fled into covens of dust, slivers of streetlamp that laid a grid from back to front room where shadows failed to creak. His exit, another window, half open in the study. The room was rigid with night, The Great Bear encrypted in the cushions. You touched frost on the inside, took to spying on your house, heard whispers in the heating kettle Morse in the water-pipes.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 7 with Rosalind Hudis is available to listen to now.

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Restorations is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance’ by Rosalind Hudis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance’ by Rosalind Hudis from her collection Restorations.

This cover shows an abstract print of blue and red mountains blocking out the sky. The text reads: Restorations: Roaalind Hudis. "If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork." – Matthew Francais

Inspired by the art restorer’s keen eye and by a vivid empathy for people and events, Restorations, is a journey through memory. Suffused with colour, inspired by thoughts of people and places, by artefacts and how the passage of time shifts perspectives and erodes surfaces, these poems are beautifully complex explorations, full of curiosity and the adventure of seeing and listening.

The Artist Mixes Colour in the Renaissance Don’t think of me as lime-robed and lost in undailiness; I come with sleeves rolled-up, worker in a mire of substance. Yes, I stink! I chew on a rotted wafer of dried fish glue my saliva in the mix. How else to stretch the hue of some frosty cleric? My paints are part kill: rabbit skin, horse hoof, pig’s blood. I knife, mine, grind, churn, pound, steep, sweat my way to that primal blue you worship. When you varnish me with meaning, remember the grit under my nails, the fumes. Green comes from the labour camps you made for your longing. And that hair-coiled girl resolved from light. She’s no touched-up pink fix. She took on the earth to coagulate: egg-yolk, red clay, mineral, old linen marble dust. Do you think, if she looked up she wouldn’t roar with the energy of her roots?

Restorations is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Or With Open Window’ by Rosalind Hudis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Or With Open Window’ by Rosalind Hudis from her most recent collection Restorations. Rosalind was recently shortlisted for the Gladstone’s Writers in Residence Award 2022. Judging will take place in October.

Restorations Rosalind Hudis. "If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork" Matthew Francis

Inspired by the art restorer’s keen eye and by a vivid empathy for people and events, Restorations, is a journey through memory. Suffused with colour, inspired by thoughts of people and places, by artefacts and how the passage of time shifts perspectives and erodes surfaces, these poems are beautifully complex explorations, full of curiosity and the adventure of seeing and listening.

Or With Open Window A Corner of the Artist’s Studio in Paris by Gwen John If she could agree to be this room or the other. Possibility pleats her. Not there, her outline sealed, but spreading, invisible, in two takes: One corner, one window, netted unnetted, above a table that’s the still crossfire where her looking springs out from an open book or coils back into a crease of wired flowers. On a white chair her blue coat streams labile, could let her slide through each frame. Even this one where the window is closed, hard edges inside a stockade of angles. Or with Open Window: the room’s misted; sharp in the distance, she’s hung a tent of reflections and sky. Where she waits can be folded/ unfolded like her paused umbrella, like triangled sunlight on the wall that could pin her to its moment or, warming outwards, paint her into the visible.

Restorations is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘Fixative’ by Rosalind Hudis

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Fixative’ by Rosalind Hudis from her new collection Restorations which was published earlier this week.

Inspired by the art restorer’s keen eye and by a vivid empathy for people and events, Restorations, is a journey through memory. Suffused with colour, inspired by thoughts of people and places, by artefacts and how the passage of time shifts perspectives and erodes surfaces, these poems are beautifully complex explorations, full of curiosity and the adventure of seeing and listening.

“If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork.” – Matthew Francis

Restorations is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy from us.

Join us for the online launch of Restorations on Tuesday 16th March from 7pm. Register for free via Evenbrite here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/141406315095.