A warm and snouting thing E-Book

Ramona Herdman

• Herausgeber: The Emma Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 20

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

'A warm and snouting thing' dances delicately between the sizzle of nerves brought on by proximity to sex and the ambiguous stability of commitment and family. These poems emphasise the physicality, not only of desire, but of the human and natural worlds which surround and shape it: springing ferns, 'saddle-soap / and saddle-sores,' and a vivid scene in which the speaker's mother boils alive 'two huge crabs, rough as roof-tiles' on a holiday with her husband and his lover. Herdman's voice is always precise, even at moments of the most brazen intimacy, whether staring at the backs of men's necks on the Tube across 'a little inch of shared air' or observing the 'patterned' flesh underneath the buttons of a corset. There are tales of teenage self-confidence ('vest tops in April') and adultery averted – but there is space here, too, for a settled life with a salad spinner, and a long-term lover's belly 'warm in its burrow'. The poet skilfully negotiates the twin pulls of the familiar and the unknown, generating a forceful and compelling charge from the energy of flight resisted.

Leseprobe

AWARMANDSNOUTINGTHING

OTHERTITLESFROMTHEEMMAPRESS

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POETRYANDARTSQUARES

Now You Can Look, by Julia Bird, illustrated by Anna Vaivare

The Goldfish, by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi

illustrated by Emma Wright

THEEMMAPRESS

First published in the UK in 2019 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © Ramona Herdman 2019

All rights reserved.

The right of Ramona Herdman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Edited by Richard O’Brien

Typeset by Emma Wright

ISBN 978-1-912915-29-3

EPUBISBN 978-1-912915-30-9

A CIP catalogue record of this book

is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the UK

by Oxuniprint Ltd, Oxford.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[email protected]

Birmingham, UK

CONTENTS

He sits slightly too close and we don’t look at each other

Jill had two ponies

No Better Than She Should Be Red

Nudes

Ferns

Sixteen

Shave

Daphne

Shaped

I’ll never have a child to bring to this beach

Buttoned

Marilyn

Comeuppance

Bless email and bless boredom and bless

This is just to say

Precipitation

Two cats on a Valentine’s card

Salad spinner

Anniversary present

Anemone

There is a thing

Tease

Valentine, thirteen years in

Notes on the Poems

Acknowledgements

About the Poet

About the Emma Press

He sits slightly too close and we don’t look at each other

I thought it had gone – my sex-sense,

the skin-thrum awareness when you feel

through your clothes sex’s presence.

But the nerves all down my left side sizzle.