AUDIO READING FROM THE COLLECTION: BITTEN

Consolidating and deepening the achievement of her debut collection, Snakeskin Stilettos, Beneath the Ice presents a world at once familiar yet deeply troubling; a world of transience, of faces glimpsed in mirrors, of the fleeting underlying the apparently permanent and forever; of surfaces and word only half understood.

Central to this fluid collection are poems about family, love, familial duty, and mortality; about a grounding in the promises and failings of the past and yet a determined and hopeful embracing of the future.

Bitten

She’s not at all well –

sleeplessness,

obsessive thoughts,

lack of concentration,

strange aches, dreams and cravings.

Working on the principle of homeopathy and hangover

– treat like with like/hair of the dog –

she pours herself a drink

and wonders if he’d agree

to be prescribed for her cure:

man as medicine, labelled

take as required

until the symptoms have resolved themselves.