Book description
Shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe Prize for the Best First
Collection of Poetry 2010.
This debut collection from Seren, Inroads, showcases a startling
new talent. Carolyn Jess-Cooke has a sophisticated poetic intelligence
as well as a great sense of fun.
The opening piece, 'Accent' where 'stowaway inflections and
locally-produced slang/have passports of their own' is a praise poem
for the versatility and joy of language, “The way sound chases itself
in tunnels and halls, the way senses fold memory...”. This verbal
fluency and dexterity are employed to offer us poems that are
multi-faceted and often paradoxical. 'Aeneas Finds Dido on YouTube' is
part satire, part tender re-enactment of the myth, featuring the most
up-to-date media platforms.
After this playful start, a difficult childhood is evoked through
metaphor in poems like 'Music Lesson','One Thousand Painful Pieces'
and 'Bitten', all the more heartbreaking for being indirect. Other
high points are 'Newborn' with the apt description of a babe in arms
being a 'zoo of verbs/mewling, snuffling, pecking...'. This sweet
realism again gives way to metaphor, in the strangely evocative
'Dorothy's Homecoming' in a brilliant take on the classic film 'Wizard
of Oz', the power of maternal love has turned into a 'twister'.
Readers will enjoy discovering this striking and versatile new voice.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Following a BA, MA, and PhD at Queen's University, she took up a
lectureship in Film Studies at the University of Sunderland.
