Myrtle E-Book

Ruth Wiggins

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

Seitenzahl: 22

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In her heady debut pamphlet Myrtle, Ruth Wiggins celebrates the primal forces of nature and the human heart. Interweaving the ancient with the modern world, she explores fertility and death, in poems that are imbued with a subtle eroticism. There is a serious playfulness at work here too: a carnival stallholder battles with a spider, and a bored vegetarian contemplates life as a fox, while lovers fear death and separation as the gods look on in amusement. This free-wheeling and assured collection is full of dry humour and wisdom, and is by turns poignant, dark and full of zest.

Leseprobe

Myrtle

by Ruth WigginsWith an introduction by Deryn Rees-Jones

The Emma Press

Dedication

for Russell, without whom no songs

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 2014by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © Ruth Wiggins 2014Introduction copyright © Deryn Rees-Jones 2014

All rights reserved.

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

eISBN 978-1-910139-12-7

Print ISBN 978-1-910139-05-9

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

theemmapress.com

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Introduction

To read a Ruth Wiggins poem is to take a side-step into another world. That poetic world is characterised by risk, energy, desire, delight in otherness and the dappledness of language; it is a world in which, since I first began to read Ruth’s work a few years ago, I have taken a huge pleasure. There is nothing predictable or safe about where these poems end up, nor indeed about the journey on which they take you. Words ‘glee-bounce’ about and, as she also writes, get ‘festive/ in the wreckage of bonfires’. But this is not idiosyncrasy for its own sake. People talk about the importance for a poet in finding a voice. The reality is that we have many voices, and what the poet must do at the start of a career is to find the most open and deep version of the self he or she can find; or, as the poet Anne Stevenson writes, to find a place where we can best ‘inhabit poetry’. Ruth writes here with poise and humour, underscored by a great certainty in language’s capacity to hurl us into new experiences and to transform our knowledge of the world; and perhaps in her many conversations with the old gods, her writing also comes from a sense that as human beings there will always be dangers at our elbow. Elegant, unafraid, and full of the joys and pains of being alive, these poems say in the face of both ordinary and extraordinary dangers, Trust me, and we are right to do so. We are right, too, to answer the call they make when they make us laugh, or think again, and also say to us as readers, ‘Dare you’.

Deryn Rees-Jones

September 2014

Contents

Title page

Dedication

Copyright

Introduction, by Deryn Rees-Jones

*

Against Perspective

I’ve Been Crumbling Anti-Histamines Into Your Food All Week

Borrowed Time

Adjustment

Only The Lover

On Fear Of Your Flying

Reynard

Modern Herbal

Pulmón de manzana

Fourteen

Birch