The Day of the Flying Ants

by Emily Cotterill

The Day of the Flying Ants is about home and leaving home. Much of this entertaining pamphlet focuses on finding, losing, and loving a sense of place. Ants fly when theyre compelled to leave home, when theyve grown up, when theres no place in the nest anymore. Whether in Derbyshire or Wales, these well-observed poems find their own place in an odd but familiar world.

28 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Tôpher Mills]

A small but fizzingly acute collection of poems so good I was walking around my living room reading them out loud to myself. Troubled, truculent teenage years full of youthful effervescence, reminding me of what it's like to be young (no mean feat for an old git like myself). When everything is bright and crispy new and you hurl yourself at life with a reckless, intoxicating zeal. Passion, love, laughter, the hugeness of loss and the devastatingly ordinary. Too soon the poems move away in place and time to look back with a sudden hiraeth that they can almost enjoy wallowing in. The somewhat deviant 'Dark Heart' and the internal journey of 'I Have Loved Coal' marvellously evoke what it is like to come from a coal mining town. There is a delightful wildness to her style that makes you want to go off and write a poem yourself. Whatever that undefinable magical something is that gives some poets an extra bit of pizzazz, Emily Cotterill has it in abundance.

[Lucy S]

Loved reading this collection.
Stories and memories stuck in my head and there's some wonderful thinking on the meaning of home