A Season of Small Insanities (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Porter, Andrea

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844715094 ISBN 13: 9781844715091

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2009

Synopsis

These poems introduce voices that clamour to be heard. The language is vibrantly now, the context the everyday but at times things are a little skewed, as if something slightly odd has been glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The poet inhabits a world where angels comment on tea towels in a gift shop, Medusa travels on the train, Emily Dickinson waits for a phone call, a woman has dinner with Goya’s polished skull. However reality is brought sharply into focus by the trafficked east European girl, the Zimbabwean immigrant woman, the carer, the sex chat line worker, the people in the all night petrol station.

Every emotion that make us fully human, including humour, weave through this collection. The poems mirror life and show us who we are, who we could have been and who we might become. In the final section we are drawn into the world of personal trauma and loss. This is the mirror we would rather walk away from and yet the scalpel-like precision of each word, the light touch of the language beckons us in as if we already know that the ‘you’ watched in this sequence could easily be us, if we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This book has a compulsive and vital authenticity, after reading it you feel that you have been on a journey with the poet through a strange yet also oddly familiar landscape and have arrived somewhere well worth visiting.

About this title

About the Author

Andrea Porter is a member of the Joy of Six Poetry Ensemble that has performed in the UK and the USA. She has been published in variety of poetry magazines in the UK, Canada and the USA. She received an Escalator Award in 2005 and an Arts Council grant in 2006. She is also a fiction writer and has had short stories published and has just completed her first novel. Her pamphlet Bubble was adapted for BBC Radio 4 by the playwright Fraser Grace. She writes a blog, We Liked It but not Quite Enough (www.welikeditbutnotquiteenough.blogspot.com)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Marrying Richard Harris

This was not what you wrote in your diary
when you were twelve years old.
Not this holding of a second dead child
in a room next to the scrape of plates,
all those uneaten fish Friday lunches,
the drumming of pipes in a busy sluice.

I will marry Richard Harris.
Sing on Top of the Pops.
Not bite my nails.
Fill a country house with children.
Write a book. Have pierced ears.
Drive a car.
Live in Ireland by the sea.
Wear jeans all the time.
Adopt stray cats and orphans.
Own two wolfhounds.
Ride a horse better than Christine White’s.
Travel to one name from each page in my atlas.

This was the hope list in HB pencil,
your future plans in neat joined-up writing.
You rock him and cry as is called for.
Marrying Richard Harris would have avoided this,
stopped this falling apart
in a space set aside for the purpose.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844715094
• ISBN 13: 9781844715091
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80