Overview

In her vibrant third collection, Rebecca Watts shines a light on the tender, spontaneous, creative and creaturely aspects of the self, and asks how we might nurture and shield these from the many physical, psychological and social forces predisposed to keep them down. Wearing a variety of costumes, or none at all, the characters in these dramatic poems play hide-and-seek, guarding their vulnerabilities while yearning for greater connection with others and the world. Animals, as totems and spirit guides, swim, run and fly across the pages. Children tiptoe and improvise their way through landscapes designed to curtail and bewilder them. Adults curate their own funerals, befriend spiders, try to love each other, and go to war. Poets and other heroes – Brontë, Heaney, Plath, Yeats, Mary Poppins – are confronted, reflected, refracted and left echoing anew.

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9781800174580

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Reviews

‘Such deliberate and careful contrariness is Watts all over, and it is, I think, unique in contemporary poetry’ - Chris Edgoose, Woodbee Poet

'Such deliberate and careful contrariness is Watts all over, and it is, I think, unique in contemporary poetry' - Chris Edgoose, Woodbee Poet

Author Information

Rebecca Watts's debut poetry collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize and named as one of the Guardian and Financial Times's 'Best Books of 2016'. Her second collection Red Gloves was published in 2020 and won a Gladstone's Library Writers-in-Residence Award. Rebecca has completed Fellowships with the Hawthornden Foundation and the Royal Literary Fund, and received awards for works in progress from the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, the Society of Authors and Arts Council England. In 2019 she edited Elizabeth Jennings: New Selected Poems for Carcanet. She currently lives in Cambridge, UK, where she works part-time in a library and as a freelance editor and tutor.

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