Inroads

by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

Shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First Collection of Poetry 2010. This debut collection from Seren, Inroads, showcases a startling new talent. Carolyn Jess-Cooke has a sophisticated poetic intelligence as well as a great sense of fun. The opening piece, 'Accent' where 'stowaway inflections and locally-produced slang/have passports of their own' is a praise poem for the versatility and joy of language, "The way sound chases itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory...". This verbal fluency and dexterity are employed to offer us poems that are multi-faceted and often paradoxical. 'Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube' is part satire, part tender re-enactment of the myth, featuring the most up-to-date media platforms. After this playful start, a difficult childhood is evoked through metaphor in poems like 'Music Lesson','One Thousand Painful Pieces' and 'Bitten', all the more heartbreaking for being indirect. Other high points are 'Newborn' with the apt description of a babe in arms being a 'zoo of verbs/mewling, snuffling, pecking...'. This sweet realism again gives way to metaphor, in the strangely evocative 'Dorothy's Homecoming' in a brilliant take on the classic film 'Wizard of Oz', the power of maternal love has turned into a 'twister'. Readers will enjoy discovering this striking and versatile new voice.

Genres: Poetry

70 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 22, 2010

About the author

C.J. (Carolyn) Cooke is an acclaimed, award-winning poet, novelist and academic with numerous publications as Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Caro Carver. Her work has been published in twenty-three languages to date. Born in Belfast, C.J. has a PhD in Literature from Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women’s writing and creative writing interventions for mental health. Her books have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, and the Daily Mail. She has been nominated for an Edgar Award and an ITW Thriller Award, selected as Waterstones’ Paperback Book of the Year and a BBC 2 Pick, and has had two Book of the Month Club selections in the last year. She lives in Scotland with her husband and four children.

Reviews

[Helen Skene · Rating 1 out of 5]

Clever but cold. I want poetry to touch my soul; this did not.

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a clever, engaging collection of contemporary poetry - I found myself totally absorbed and reading each poem again and again to really capture the magic of it. The poems are so well-written and the themes can really be related to.

It's hard to pick my favourites but I loved "Second-Hand Words", "Dorothy's Homecoming" and "Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube".