“This work challenges our abstract and cosy notions of motherhood with a brutal and vulnerable delve into the psyche. Calcutt grapples, sometimes violently, sometimes with aching tenderness, each hard-won line ‘like squeezing / flesh and fruit from the bone, / this terrible love’. Yet these poems reach even further, into the rent world, and the remarkable kinds of beauty to which poetry alone can allude. This is an intimate book, the kind that comes in close to your ear to whisper dark secrets and unavoidable truths. These poems are spare, careful, insistent--and devastatingly good.” Robert Peake
“Helen Calcutt’s poems are full of surprising and intricate moments - they unfold like origami, deftly packing and unpacking themselves into new forms and presenting the reader with confidences, secrets and insight, the tender words for the things that are hard to say. In their explorations of motherhood, loss and discovery, Calcutt’s poetry is steeled with precise language, always finding clarity forged in the heart of experience. These are intimate poems which are felt in the body, and written with a keen physicality – ‘love is meant to live on in the body’ writes Calcutt, ‘My flesh making heaven of it.’ In their makings and re-makings, each poem here reveals this to be a remarkable and potent debut.” Jane Commane
The listening tree
I don’t know when this began. I have an ear
for the beautiful/terrible
sounds, soaked with rain.
With my hearing in such leaves,
I can bear the worst of human music.
I’ve gone so very far, listening
without moving. My roots are bound
by ribbons in the earth
which lengthen into my back
and I sway, as it happens
in these roots from my back. I listen,
and sleep between the dark
and the dark
where my hearing is suspended.
And between this and my skull,
it’s all dark matter,
where earth and her sweetness
have darkened to gather each
bone to a bone,
every coil to a chord.
I sing, though you wouldn’t know it.
My mouth is sunk in a pool
of old life,
it glitters and tries
to sing of its light,
and cries owl-cries
for a secret way out. Still, I bend
my thick spine
to bare my neck, and touch you.
You could almost be a stranger
who's found me by a road,
you hold out your arms
as if you hold the great world,
you place your hands
on my body and hair. Your tears
catch on the quiet in the air,
and shake and glitter with the shakings
of your hair;
something in your shape
is like a tree, like me. I barely brush you
and your mouth comes alive on my light,
I barely sigh I am a temple, I am
soaking you with light.
If I could birth myself a second time,
I’d have your soul.
You rock and sigh ‘oh I’m done, Mother,
I’m done.’ But the young, my love,
are free, or didn’t you know? There’s no
god in this world.
The closest thing to prayer is
a child who says she hurts.
Like love -- Brenda Read-Brown-- 7 November 2018
“The poems in Like love are uncluttered. They are simple, profound, and immensely touching. There is great empathy at work here, an empathy without which no real poems can exist. Read-Brown deserves a far wider readership than hitherto, and one hopes with this collection she will find it.” Brian Patten
“These approachable poems are full of humour and life experience. Like love faces up to ageing, loss and injustice with an eye for contradiction and detail. Poems about clearing out a child’s bedroom after they have left home, about angels, first love and sunbathing topless exude unquenchable enthusiasm for living! A collection to relish from a seasoned and generous poet.” Chloe Garner, Artistic Director, Ledbury Poetry Festival
“The most prolific slam winner the UK has ever had; a joy of a performer with a huge range of material that varies in style and content.” Steve Larkin
“These poems remind me of the tingles. I’m so happy to feel them. This collection makes me want to run outside, kiss, fall in leaves and then write.” Hollie McNish
Like love is very open and very unpredictable.
A sample poem from Like love can be enjoyed below. More information and ordering for
Like love can be found
here.
Poetry has no learning objective
Words are winds
that ruffle thoughts
and blow down structures
we thought solid.
The man with a cobra
tattooed across his forehead
might be a gentle vegan.
Some people spend their spare time
painting angels.
The kid “you’ll need to watch for”
will give me images
fresh as mermaids.
Rhyme can hurt,
and metaphor disturb.
Hugs and cake
are both important.
Words are winds on water,
and water is what we’re made of.
These nights at home -- Alex Reed & Keren Banning -- 30 November 2018
These nights at home -- a pamphlet of poems by Alex Reed with images from photographer Keren Banning.
These nights at home, which follows on from Alex Reed’s earlier V. Press pamphlet A Career in Accompaniment, is very personal, and yet very familiar. This longer pamphlet voices the loneliness and isolation that follow bereavement, and the predicament of trying to begin anew. Moments of tenderness, flashback, longing and love flicker through the mind and heart as the months pass. The poems are accompanied by Keren Banning’s striking series of photographic images that are simultaneously abstract and intimate, drawing the reader further into this fragmented landscape.“The most striking feature of Alex Reed’s poems in These nights at home is their clarity – a transparency that allows the reader in to the emotions and experience they explore. This lucid quality allows complex and deep feelings to be expressed vividly. Being able to approach the most difficult human experience so directly and honestly makes the poems moving and compelling. Specific concrete details convey loss and grief, loneliness, the pull of memory. Recurring motifs – empty rooms, hallways, doors – suggest the slow and repetitive process of grieving. There is nothing spare in the poems. Every word earns its place. The voice is quiet, restrained, attentive. The poems are not sombre. There are flashes of humour and a range of tone is created through the different poetic forms – prose poems building unsettling extended metaphors, experimental layouts suggesting a shifting sense of memory and perception. The pamphlet shows the reader what it means to be living with loss, conveying the process of grief with its ‘pacing hours’, and just a hint of a tentative way forward. It reminds us how, in the right hands, the economy of poetry can communicate the most complex of emotions.” Cynthia Fuller“Less fraught than A Career in Accompaniment, more a slow immersive haunting, the poems in These nights at home enter a different unknown – the oceanic space of loss and absence. Tentative minimalism provides the key to open up distances, far and near. Here, less is more – reflective territory exquisitely distilled in Keren Banning’s spectral photographs.” Linda France
A sample poem and a sample image from this longer pamphlet can be found below. More information and ordering for
These nights at home can be found
here.
SAMPLE POEM & PHOTO from THESE NIGHTS AT HOME
deep river
friends say it’s early yet
your picture on the fireplace, smiling
it takes a year
your reading specs on the table
it takes two years
folded clothes still on the shelves
it takes four years
faint trace of you from the wool
there is a river that runs within –
vast, uncharted, rising
