Overview

It starts with an all-consuming job and its associated terrors. But from a life teetering on collapse and the aftermath of grief, anger and illness comes reflection, redemption and the joy of everyday epiphanies. Women stand their ground: a mother quietly refuses to take her pills, a Greek hetaira defends her reputation, a sister's imagined wheelchair 'always knows where the speed cameras are.' Take a trip down to Hell with a delusional despot, put yourself in the hands of an unreliable air traffic controller. Relax. Love conquers all.

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9781738405947

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Reviews

""While Houghton's foray into American corporate capitalism equips her with a satire-ready vocabulary, she is equally fluent in the idioms of another inferno - that of Dante - and the poems that show his influence are transcendent. Houghton writes with poignancy, humour, formal versatility and, most of all, a refreshing self-awareness that circumvents both self-aggrandizement and self-pity."" - Kathryn Maris ""Robin Houghton is a poet who really notices things - silly and deadly serious, quotidian and extraordinary, often all at once - and knows precisely how to sift them so that only tight, resonant poems fall out. She makes 'the debris of our private lives' newly familiar and honestly strange, and never solely for sport, though she is playful too. The Mayday Diaries is a stylistically and thematically dextrous triumph in four unyieldingly inventive movements, and I don't write that lightly. "" - Rory Waterman ""There's so much delight and surprise in these poems. A clarity of diction together with a playful reach and sense of experimentation, a formal agility and, for all their dramatic storytelling and beguiling sense of humour, a persistent subtlety, an emotional tension in even the most light-hearted or casual lines. What do we feel when we hear the word Mayday? Alarm, fear, intrigue. And what do we hope to find in a diary? Intimate confessions, the inner workings of a psyche trying to make sense of the world. The unusual conflation of these two words in the title of the collection evokes perfectly the intense and everyday wonder at its heart."" - Greta Stoddart

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