How to Carry Fire

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Ganwyd How to Carry Fire o lwch dibyniaeth deuluol. Gan gychwyn gyda llosgi cartref ei phlentyndod, mae Christina Thatcher yn archwilio sut y gall tân ddinistrio a glanhau. Mae ei gwaith yn cydnabod bod marwydos ymhobman: mewn ffermdai, nodwyddau heroin a madfallau gwenwynig.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

How to Carry Fire was born from the ashes of family addiction. Beginning with the burning down of her childhood home, Thatcher explores how fire can both destroy and cleanse. Her work recognises embers everywhere: in farmhouses, heroin needles and poisonous salamanders.

Dosbarthu

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Shortlisted for the Bare Fiction Debut Poetry Collection Competition in 2015 and a winner in the Terry Hetherington Award for Young Writers in 2016, Christina Thatcher's poetry and short stories have featured in over 40 publications including The London Magazine, Planet Magazine, And Other Poems, Acumen and The Interpreter's House. Her first collection, More than you were, was published by Parthian Books in 2017.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

The first poem in Christina Thatcher’s How to Carry Fire describes the challenges of dealing with an insurance report in the aftermath of a fire. A casual reader might be forgiven for thinking from this that the book is perhaps a literally-titled instruction manual, but they’d be wrong. There was, we learn, an actual fire that burned down Thatcher’s home. However, the titular fire of this collection is much more than that. Fire is grief, frustration, worry, anxiety, trauma and more. All that we live through is carried with us and that’s not always easy. What Thatcher does so well is make the darkest experiences feel light, easier and sometimes beautiful in their terribleness. ‘First Crush’ is a perfect example of this: unflinchingly sharing with the reader the experiences of child abuse and the death of her father, Thatcher still gives such a vivid image of childhood and highlights the complexity of feeling when reflecting as an adult. This flitting of perspectives between childhood and adulthood is something she does so well. On visiting her brother in prison, Thatcher mentions the ‘rickety bunkbeds’ of their childhood, and goes on to describe the follow-up to her visit in the present: ‘We are smokejumpers, survivors.’ Thatcher’s brother is a recurring figure in this collection. As an addict, he has complex challenges that leave those around him with their own additional challenges, too. In dealing with these, Thatcher reflects through time, back to their shared childhood, her own adulthood, and looking supportively at her nephew’s childhood with an addict as a father. ‘Becoming an Astronaut’ gives a simplistic, childlike view on drugs that rests on the idea of an astronaut being the personification of ‘getting high’. ‘Worth Telling’ is a sweet reflection of her brother for the purposes of making him human and relatable to his own son. In these lines he’s no longer a prisoner or an addict, but just someone who is good at Nintendo and cooking eggs. The past, for Thatcher, is not behind her, but carried through. Having grown up in America, Wales is where she now lives, but the burden of the past is still present. ‘Keeping Warm’ and ‘Touring Tenby with the Man I Will One Day Marry’ are both incredibly fond portraits of a place that’s become home. Her partner and life now are portrayed with fondness and comfort, but the trauma of the past remains present. ‘Sums’ describes material comfort (‘I buy things now / without my stomach seizing up…’) but ends harking back to others. By doing well, has she betrayed the natural order of things? Similarly, ‘What Comes Next’ looks forward to an uncertain future fuelled by the experiences of her past. ‘Because now I love, I fear / my husband will die’. Thatcher’s dead father, addict brother, abuse, shifted sense of home… all place an emphasis on what’s gone before and its role in the future. In the context of all this, the poem that gives this collection its name is all the more staggeringly beautiful and practical: ‘…Take what those flames can give you. Feel heat enter your stomach. Stay wary now. You must never let the light go out. Keep it lit until you learn to glow.’ This collection is Thatcher’s glow.