Rebecca Watts: Red Gloves (Poetry)

In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut The Met Office Advises Caution, Rebecca Watts observes and tests the limits of humanity’s engagement with the non-human.

By turns lyrical and narrative, the poems examine familiar subjects – environmental crisis, hawks, hospitals, the sea, barbecues, flowers, Emily Dickinson – only to find their subjects staring, sometimes fighting, back.

Nature and nurture, equally red in tooth and claw, power a book-long sparring match between the overthinking poet and the ever-thoughtless universe, between the craft’s isolation and the world’s irrepressible variety.

Gloves on and gloves off, the poet’s hands destroy and build, gather and scatter, caress and strike.

Red Gloves

The women are carrying the coffin. Under the fear
of slippage they make slow steps.
We cannot say that they advance.

More than one woman is weathering – from the cool
top of her head to her strained fingers to her toes
pushed together in interview shoes – the urge,
like a rip tide, to run backwards and away.
Today is not a normal day.

( . . . )

Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge. Her debut poetry collection, The Met Office Advises Caution, was published by Carcanet in 2016. She is also the editor of Elizabeth Jennings: New Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2019).

Publisher: ‎ Carcanet Press Ltd.
Language: ‎ English
Paperback
72 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 178410955X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1784109554
2020
£9.89

• fleursdumal.nl magazine

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