Red Gloves

by Rebecca Watts

An unflinching, lyrical examination of the intimate conflicts between people, and between the human and the non-human.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published June 26, 2020

About the author

Commendation for The Met Office Advises Caution: Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Financial Times Best Books of 2016
Guardian Best Books of 2016
The Poetry School Books of the Year 2016
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Full Collection 2017

Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge, where she works in a library and as a freelance editor. A selection of her poetry was included in New Poetries VI (2015). Her debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and featured in the Guardian and Financial Times ‘Best Books of 2016’ lists.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) I noted the recurring comparison of natural and manmade spaces; outdoors (flowers, blackbirds, birds of prey, the sea) versus indoors (corridors, office life, even Emily Dickinson’s house in Massachusetts). The style shifts from page to page, ranging from prose paragraphs to fragments strewn across the layout. Most of the poems are in recognizable stanzas, though these vary in terms of length and punctuation. Alliteration and repetition (see, as an example of the latter, her poem “The Studio” on the TLS website) take priority over rhymes. I was reminded of Elizabeth Bishop in places, while “Whereas” had me thinking of Stephen Dunn’s collection of that name (Layli Long Soldier also has a poetry book of the same title). A few of my individual favorite poems were “Surveillance,” “Building” and “Admission” (on a medical theme: “What am I afraid of? / The breaching of skin. / Violation of laws that / separate outside from in. / Liquidation of the thing / I call me.”).

(Out on June 26th. I received a free PDF copy from the publisher for review.)

[Rosamund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shapely writing. Some unsettling moments and others with a frisson of recognition.

[P.D. Dawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a style that creates meaning and pauses out of its white spaces, this is intimate and serene poetry distilled to its barest parts. Through these empty spaces, the meaning is changed, mutated and evolved. One cannot deny that one of the loudest sounds is silence, and the silence moves between Watts' poetry with an effortless evocation, creating a style both intimate and distant at the same time.