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.