Wild Heather

Siân S. Rathore

really liked it 4.00 · Rating details · 5 ratings · 0 reviews

“This is a collection that starts with an apology and ends with a goodbye, but everything in between is as scary, wonderful and inexplicable as your own relationships and daily metamorphoses. These are love poems of Communism and physical comedy, murder and beautiful ospreys, witchcraft and striplighting. At times there’s a vertiginous sense that this is an intellect in fr “This is a collection that starts with an apology and ends with a goodbye, but everything in between is as scary, wonderful and inexplicable as your own relationships and daily metamorphoses. These are love poems of Communism and physical comedy, murder and beautiful ospreys, witchcraft and striplighting. At times there’s a vertiginous sense that this is an intellect in free-fall determined to take you with it. It’s a good and unsettling feeling. If they are intricate and self-conscious (and I think that vital self-questioning is a prerequisite for real 21st century poetry) they are also forceful, urgent and confessional; it’s a mature voice that can pull that off. The other day I read a time-killing article about a Romanian girl whose late mother had sent her a selfie from beyond the grave. The girl was disturbed and said that the image was hazy and seemed to come from a tear in the fabric between this world and the next. I feel as though that’s where these poems come from, too, a collective unconsciousness where we can literally catch thoughts and show them to one another laughing in recognition, relief and fear.”
--Luke Kennard, author of Cain

"Poems with an eye on love and hurt, bold and delicate, broken like the cracked screen of an iPhone, buzzing with notifications all through the night, charged and still recharging. Poems that split apart, then get back together at the cliff edge of romantic experience; that follow the cruelty of love through the phases of the moon, on to the moors in the summer rain. Poetry was made for obsession like this, and the rhythmic bursts of this poetry are perfectly obsessive. It hooks you, hexes you, leaves you wide eyed and bleeding like the rising sun you thought you'd never see."
--Stephen Nelson, author of Lunar Poems For New Religions

"Rathore's writing is exhilarating; funny, daring, and deeply, deeply moving. This collection is one of the best I've read all year; it's a book of rare ambition and scale."
--Keiran Goddard, author of For The Chorus ...more