Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
In her Shambles
In her Shambles
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
Mae casgliad bywiog, cyntaf o gerddi Elizabeth Parker, a anwyd yn Fforest y Ddena, yn ein cyflwyno i fardd sy'n defnyddio iaith gydag afiaith. Mae ei thestunau yn cynnwys cerdd am aelodau teuluol wedi'u hymgorffori gan afonydd yn ogystal â cherddi a ysbrydolwyd gan berthnasau, boed gariad cyntaf neu dor-perthynas.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
Born in the Forest Of Dean, Elizabeth Parker's lively début collection of poems, In Her Shambles , introduces us to a poet who uses language with verve and zest. Her subjects range from a poem where family members are embodied by their own rivers, to carefully observed set-pieces inspired by relationships, from burgeoning first loves to break-ups.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9781781724460
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9781781724460
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- In her Shambles
- Awdur / Author
- Parker, Elizabeth
- Current Price ex VAT
- £9.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £9.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Reprinting
- Availability Status (CY)
- Adargraffu
- Dyddiad argaeledd / Availability Date
- 2018-05-03
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2018-05-03
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Seren
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 60 pages
- Size
- 138 × 216 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Barddoniaeth (yn Saesneg) | EN: Poetry (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Beirdd Unigol (yn Saesneg) | EN: Individual Poets (in English)
Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography
Elizabeth Parker grew up in the Forest of Dean, attended Monmouth Comprehensive School in Wales and currently lives on the harbour in Bristol. She has a BA First Class Hons in English Literature and Creative Writing from Warwick University, an MA in Mythology from Bristol and also has a PGCE in English Secondary Teaching. She has published widely in magazines and has a poetry pamphlet Antinopolis . She has won or been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the Bridport, Melita Hume, Troubadour International, and Gregory O’Donoghue awards. Parker is also a member of The Spoke Bristol Poetry Group who perform their work at festivals and events (with other Seren authors: Claire Williamson, Paul Deaton and Robert Walton).
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
From the first poem in this impressive debut collection, there is a sense of mastery, of language taut yet tensile, of breath-taking imagery. The opening scene in ‘Crockery’ presents someone the speaker can’t look at, someone who we glimpse through fragmentary reflections in ‘glass, chrome, china’, the ‘pale glaze on white plates’. ‘I can’t look at you’ is repeated, accentuating the drama taking place, something edgy across a table, a domestic scene that seems to have gone wrong. The speaker’s gaze is averted so that, ‘Instead, I watch your coffee ripple/when you knock the table with your knee’, a prelude, it is suggested, to leaving, when ‘glasses clear/spoons lose their dash of colour’. The third poem ‘Clasp’ seems to portray an afterwards, the speaker cooking with garlic and noticing, ‘One of the first absences … a missing scent’. There is an incredible precision in this poet’s descriptions, such as, ‘She scrunches onion paper/pinches a tooth of garlic from its husk’, and her titles further the poems, as here, adding depth to their themes, clasp working as both verb and noun. Here, we have hands at work peeling garlic, sharpening a pencil ‘he enjoyed/yellow and thick as a finger … with his clasp knife’. Now, though, ‘she notices her shadow alone on the walls’. Hands feature in other poems. ‘Rescues’ is a tender eulogy to the speaker’s father, his hands used for rescue – of the fallow doe, the pipistrelle, house martin chicks, ‘Birds, shrews, mice/pried from the white portcullis/of the cat’s teeth…’, spiders, a buzzard and, finally, ‘His three daughters/calling to him from their cities/…/saving us each time.’ Hands are watched, explored, used to paint with, make a vase, play piano, cook with, and, crucially, write with. In ‘Manus’, the poem juxtaposes ‘an essay arguing [hands’] evolution for use of weapons’ with someone playing the piano; words on a page propounding a theory set beside ‘your rhythmic hands/bridged for Clair de Lune ’. These are the same hands, it is suggested, that the speaker’s ‘skin remembers’ when ‘You tapped time on my spine’. Violence and love-making, angling the aim of a gun or making music, are thus placed together as potentials of human being and doing – yet we are left with the music of love which, ‘altered my rhythm/lifted fine threads/until my blood re-tuned.’ In the two ‘Lavinia’ poems, the loss – of not only hands, but tongue – comes to the fore, but you have to know who Lavinia is, for Parker doesn’t patronise her readers. She simply provides a quotation from Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, Titus Andronicus , as epigraph for each poem, so you know it is that Lavinia, the character who is first barbarously raped, then silenced by having her tongue cut out and her hands lopped off. ‘Following Lavinia’ is a sequence of four poems, three of them titled with a man’s name and the fourth poem called simply ‘Their names’. In each of the first three poems, the speaker reads the play with reference to each of the named men, such as: ‘I read the hunt … sitting at his desk’; ‘I watched the hunt with Paul’. In the final poem, though, the focus is purely on ‘her’: ‘They took her tongue, her hands/so she tried to write with driftwood, sand.’ There is a powerful sense created of striving for expression, of valour against the odds, against forces too strong. Parker has a canny way of bringing together tangential parts that point towards meaning – yet nothing is laid on with a trowel. Here, there is the suggestion of struggle, of how hard it is for a woman’s voice to be heard. ‘Lavinia Writes’, which comes a little later in the collection, picks up the themes again, going for the jugular, the wound itself: ‘I dipped a finger in my mouth/strummed then picked the stitches/in the root of my stolen tongue.’ Most stanzas include ‘I’ and a verb: ‘I tipped …’, ‘I sign …’, ‘I write bright, long sentences over chairs, walls, floors’, the wound being the source: ‘I tipped my head over paper/let my words pump, breach the dam/fill fibres, glut pores.’ The theme of being without a voice, without dexterity of expression, carries its horrors, but finding voice despite the obstacles is what triumphs, what heals: ‘I tear more, free more/until I am fluent’.
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