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Creatures of the Intertidal Zone
Susan is regarded as a witty, lyrical and inventive poet, who deals with social and environmental issues as well as with the more intimate and personal. Her first full-length collection, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, has just been published by Cinnamon Press and was launched at the Norwegian Church Arts Centre in Cardiff. The book was written after Susan was awarded a Churchill Travel Fellowship to journey through Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland in the footsteps of Gudrid, an intrepid tenth/eleventh century female Viking.
93 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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June 15, 2009
CREATURES OF THE INTERTIDAL ZONE is a collection of poetry rooted in the natural world, specifically in ice and ocean and the journeys made across them by humans and animals. There are poems here based on the experience of the men, including Scott and Shackleton, who explored the Antarctic and others based on stories of the Scandanavian heroines Gudrid and Freydis. There are several poems about penguins, including the humourous villanelle BOOKSHOP BLUES:
I wish I could leave this book's orange spine.
I've been Great Fiction's symbol for too long.
It's time someone thought up a new design —
and GROUNDED the delightful meditation on the evolution of the penguin as a flightless bird:
I acquired a real flair for plummeting,
and still rate my first bungled landing
as the greatest achievement of my life.
Birds also feature in THE LONGEST FLIGHT, a series about migration.
The most powerful poems though are those that deal with ice and global warming. DEFROSTING is a description of a penguin sculpted from ice by South Korean artist Byung-Soo Choi, as it melts. THE ICE IS WEARING PURPLE offers the image of ice grown old, while THOUGHT FOR THE DAY equates ice with a god:
God is getting hot. Big chunks
of god keep breaking off.
God will force the waters of the world to rise —
and he'll capsize much more than a lone Pacific atoll
for god knows that most people have stopped
believing
in ice.
(A version of this review was first published on New Hope International online, a now defunct website of small press reviews. You can read the full review at: http://www.geraldengland.co.uk/revs/b...)
I wish I could leave this book's orange spine.
I've been Great Fiction's symbol for too long.
It's time someone thought up a new design —
and GROUNDED the delightful meditation on the evolution of the penguin as a flightless bird:
I acquired a real flair for plummeting,
and still rate my first bungled landing
as the greatest achievement of my life.
Birds also feature in THE LONGEST FLIGHT, a series about migration.
The most powerful poems though are those that deal with ice and global warming. DEFROSTING is a description of a penguin sculpted from ice by South Korean artist Byung-Soo Choi, as it melts. THE ICE IS WEARING PURPLE offers the image of ice grown old, while THOUGHT FOR THE DAY equates ice with a god:
God is getting hot. Big chunks
of god keep breaking off.
God will force the waters of the world to rise —
and he'll capsize much more than a lone Pacific atoll
for god knows that most people have stopped
believing
in ice.
(A version of this review was first published on New Hope International online, a now defunct website of small press reviews. You can read the full review at: http://www.geraldengland.co.uk/revs/b...)
Displaying 1 of 1 review