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Shipwrecks have made the fortunes of looters and of literature. A merchant ship returning from Grenada was wrecked on the coast of Devon in 1772. Aboard was a sole female passenger. Using this distant tragedy, Carol Watts has composed a sequence of poems where records, past and present, fictional and historical, mesh into one another. The looting that took place is evoked against that of contemporary warmongers, mercenary armies, global commerce. This resonant book is a poetic investigation into the wrecking of cultural legacy and it understands women’s experience as still largely unrecorded, erased from the logs of culture. A ship is always she and “she is wreck”. - Caroline Bergvall
Some one, some thing, quickens, is born, murdered: “I rack such wrack here is the account” says our sea steward. Severely aligned with the forms and exigencies of weather, no excess allowed, only crushed shell carved “written on her skin” in skin, small terror ever more vivid as magnified through the eye of this exquisite needle. - Susan Gevirtz
Carol Watts lives in London. She is the author of a chapbook, brass, running, and alphabetise, a book of prose chronicles. She teaches at Birkbeck, University of London, where she co-directs the Centre for Poetics. Her publications include Dorothy Richardson, and Tristram Shandy & the Cultural Work of Empire.
2007, 978-1-874400-38-7, price £7.50, 52pp | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Fast, busy, swerving, unpredictable, glancing, glimmering, and it never peters out. There is surge after surge after surge of invention and vividness and brio, and every single page just crackles with ideas. - Rod Mengham