Silver Samovar - Softcover

McRobert, Jenny

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798529885888

Publisher: Independently published, 2021

Synopsis

Silver Samovar is Jenny McRobert’s debut collection. Loving, loss and survival are the themes that bind this collection together. At the heart is the journey back into her family’s flight from persecution and the pogroms of early 20th century Russia. She explores how we come to understand and accept our own peculiar family histories as she searches her roots, and sense of identity, through travel and relationships. Jenny writes with courage and clarity about how it is to be ‘different.’
‘I loved this collection. Whether writing gentle and delicately beautiful nature poems, poems about childhood evoking a lost world of winceyette and Bakelite, or handling the pain and cruelty of antisemitism, this poet writes with honesty, a light touch and a sense of humour. I was particularly struck by the way food is used as a strong theme throughout, cooking with its smells and tastes is always associated with family, love, the past and what a rich and fascinating past it is.’
Carole Bromley
‘In Silver Samovar there is a poetic pulse that carries us through the celebrations and betrayals of youth, as well as the frailties of later life; a pulse that communes in ‘silvery silence’ and frees ‘the locked-down past’ of persecutions, departures and arrivals – each revelation laced with the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and texture of journeys, nations and relationships. In poems written with the lightest of touches, but with the gravitas of truth, the book coheres around its centrepiece, the long poem, ‘A Place called Golgotha’, in which the poet’s search for connection, her anthem to heritage and belonging, triumphantly finds its voice.’
Claire Dyer
‘Silver Samovar is a brilliant debut collection, full of poems which celebrate life while keeping one eye on the clock. These are poems that want to invite us, to settle us down by the fire, and to “raise a toast to our lives.” Whether she’s writing about hurtling downhill on a toboggan made out of an old washboard, or her childhood kitchen “with its pile of dishes squabbling in the sink,” or a field of rapeseed “like a Van Gogh has muscled in on a Constable,” Jenny McRobert’s gaze is clear-eyed, sharp-witted, and full of tenderness.’
Kathryn Bevis (Hampshire Poet Laureate 2020-2021)

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798529885888
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88