Cathy Galvin, "Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara"

Congratulations to Cathy Galvin, University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing student, whose poetry collection Ethnology has just been published by Bloodaxe Books!

Cathy Galvin's debut poetry collection, Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Ireland. She has published three previous pamphlets of poetry, Black & Blue (2014), Rough Translation (2016) and Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva (2019). She is widely published as a poet and short story writer and is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Heinrich Böll residency and an Arts Council England DYCP award. As a journalist she has worked as a senior editor for Newsweek and the Sunday Times. She founded the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the short story organisation, the Word Factory. She is the editor of Red, an anthology of new writing published by Waterstones. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester and lives near Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. 

About Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, by Cathy Galvin
Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language and creates a dialogue with the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agenda. Loss, and loss of a mother tongue, are carefully explored. 

You can read more about Ethnology on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Ethnology

Walls

There’s no anvil, brooch, harrow-pin.

The currach’s broken, walls stand without a roof.

All that’s left: a bureau containing bills,

cards, scarves, a Will.

You’re not in view but I can hear a breath

– the well-made dress and phrase.

My made things broke long ago.

They had little purchase on this world.

The creed, letters I do not read.

Solid seem the things that slip away.

Leaving us bone.

We stake a claim, lay foundations,

build and watch it fall.

Within, the comforts that ease survival.

We cut back wilderness, tame, contain

sycamore, birch, bramble, willow, grass.

All return.

Our walls come down, consolations go.

We do not come back. Take away it all

and what is left is who we are.

Our homes are built to go. 

Coventry Carol

You did not sing in Irish or in English.

Never told me what the English did to your people,

were clear you did not want an Irish husband,

someone who might sing sweetly and leave his wife behind,

become a father like yours who did not feed his own children.

When the Irish began bombing Birmingham,

and a shopkeeper refused to serve me in my Catholic

school uniform, your silence filled my mouth.

Helen Ivory, "Constructing a Witch"

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches for Arvon and the National Centre for Writing Academy. She has published six collections with Bloodaxe Books. The most recent, Constructing a Witch, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (2024). Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with artist Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A poem from her chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City (SurVision 2019 ) was selected as Poem on the Underground, and Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems was published by MadHat in the US in 2023. Her work has been translated into Ukrainian, Polish, Spanish, Croatian and Greek for Versopolis. In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, an award recognising the achievement and distinction of individual poets. 

About Constructing a Witch, by Helen Ivory
Despite the Devil being conceived to direct human baseness away from our goodly selves, there has always been sin in the world. The Bible has it that woman is the weaker vessel, therefore her inferior ways could easily let the Devil into the house, and into her oh so corruptible body – and thus the story begins.  

Helen Ivory’s sixth collection Constructing a Witch fixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. The witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force.

These bewitching poems explore the witch archetype and the witch as human woman. They examine the nature of superstition and the necessity of magic and counter-magic to gain a fingerhold of agency, when life is chaotic and fragile. In the poems of Constructing a Witch Helen Ivory investigates witch tourism, the witch as outsider, cultural representations of the witch, female power and disempowerment, the menopause, and how the female body has been used and misunderstood for centuries.

You can read more about Constructing a Witch on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Constructing a Witch

Some definitions of Witch

 

Carcass of rags

the dead-rat stink of old milk.

A beyond the pale beggar,

runt of the litter.

*

Gleaner of herbs

hallower of the compass.

Cunning hedge rider,

measurer of fire.

*

 

Midwife of shadows

low vixen with blood on its maw.

Deliverer of silence 

to the henhouse.

 

*

 

Lighter than a bible,

priestly ink is gravity

beneath her flying feet.

Her body writes into the sky.

 

*

 

Blended with the earth

she wears a moss cloak.

Some procure her remedies.

She is a scapegoat for bad luck.

 

*

 

A childless wraith

in a child’s picture book.

The worst mother 

man ever invented.

 

*

 

The method of kettling 

troublesome women.

A peck of black pepper

in the milk-and-water blether.

 

*

 

Practitioner of forgotten ways;

of rituals, sayer of spells.

Barefoot earth-listener,

older than God or television.

 

The Gift

There once was a lonely woman who replaced her heart with an apple. She took a sharp knife and engraved her name in its freshly shined skin, and those of the names of these spirits: Cosmer, Synady, Heupide. She stood in the middle of a bridge as the wind heaped bright dying leaves about. She balanced the apple in the palm of her hand, but nobody came for her love. And the earth moved through the seasons, and still nobody came. This carried on till the apple resembled some devil they say, and the woman herself had transmuted to dust.

One day a quiet pandemonium emanated from the apple and the townspeople hid behind themselves, too cowed to approach. A man stepped from the crowd with the air of a judge. He decreed that indeed, the apple was infested with foul spirits, and pitched it into the river with his long-legged boot. 

Sarah Holland-Batt, "The Jaguar: Selected Poems"

 

Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and critic. Born in Southport, Queensland in 1982, she grew up in Australia and the United States, and has also lived in Italy and Japan. She holds a first-class Honours degree in Literature, an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Queensland, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was the W. G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholar for 2010-2011. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell, an Asialink Literature Residency, a Château de Lavigny Fellowship, a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, and the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B. R. Whiting Studio in Rome, among other honours. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

Her first book, Aria, was the recipient of several literary prizes, including the Anne Elder Award, the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize and the Thomas Shapcott Prize, was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers' Literary Awards, and was commended for The Age's Poetry Book of the Year. Her second book, The Hazards, won the 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Prize, and the John Bray Memorial Poetry Award. Her third book, The Jaguar, won the 2023 Stella Prize, the Queensland Premier’s Award for State Significance, and the Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award, and was named The Australian newspaper’s 2022 Book of the Year. The Jaguar was also longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the ALS Gold Medal, and shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize.

About The Jaguar: Selected Poems
With its rich selection from each of Sarah Holland-Batt’s books of poetry up to her stellar prize-winning collection The Jaguar (2022), this volume will introduce one of Australia’s best-known and widely read poets to many readers for the first time.

Marked by her distinctive lyric intensity, metaphorical dexterity and linguistic mastery, Holland-Batt’s cosmopolitan poems engage with questions of loss and extinction, violence and erasure. From haunted post-colonial landscapes in Australia to brutal animal hierarchies in the cloud forests of Nicaragua to the devastations and transfigurations of her father’s long illness, Holland-Batt fearlessly probes the body’s animal endurance, appetites and metamorphoses, and our human place within the natural order of things. Her portrayal of a much-loved father trying to cope with Parkinson’s Disease touched the hearts of many in Australia who would never usually read a book of poetry.

Her poetry is charged with a fierce intelligence, and an insistence on seeing the world with exacting clarity—as well as a startling capacity to transform our understandings of the familiar through the imaginative act. The poet’s piercing gaze is also frequently turned inward, offering a dissection of the self that is by turns playful and sharply ironic.

The Jaguar: Selected Poems brings together the finest work from her debut volume Aria (2008), with its minimalistic interrogations of the tyrannies of memory; the searching external and internal landscapes of The Hazards (2015); and the fierce, unflinching elegies of The Jaguar (2022), which challenge us to view ruthless witness as a form of love. 

You can read more about The Jaguar: Selected Poems on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Jaguar: Selected Poems, by Sarah Holland-Batt

Empires of Mind

Beside the fountain’s troupe of sun-bleached rubber ducks,
in the gardens, under a shade sail, 
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.
Midway through a lunch of cremated schnitzel
spoon-fed by the carer with the port-wine stain
my father is crying about Winston Churchill.

In the night he cries out for Winston Churchill.
During his morning bath he cries for Winston Churchill.
When the nurse does up his buttons he will not stop his weeping. 
When the therapist wheels him to Tuesday piano
my father ignores the Mozart and cries for Winston Churchill.

He cries not like a child seeking absolution, 
not like the mourner or the mourned, but free and unconstrained
as one who has spent a long time denying an urge
and is suddenly giddy and incontinent in his liberation.

The cleaners are unmoved. The woman 
who brings his hourly cup of pills is bright as a firework 
and goes about her round with the hardness 
of one who has heard all the crying in the world 
and finds in that reservoir nothing more disturbing
than a tap’s dripping drumbeat in a sink. 

But the night supervisor is frightened 
in the early hours when the halls ping 
with the sharp beep of motion sensors and my father’s crying. 
His longing for silence is fierce and keen
as a pregnant woman’s craving for salt and fried chicken, 
as my father’s crying for Winston Churchill. 

And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus
croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark—
unsettled, loud, insatiable—the unutterable fear 
rippling through them like a herd of horses 
apprehending the tremor of thunder
on a horizon they cannot see but feel. 

The Gift

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair

garlanded by summer hibiscus

like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.

A flowering wreath buzzes around his head—

passionate red. He holds the gift of death

in his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black.

He has been waiting seventeen years to open it

and is impatient. When I ask how he is

my father cries. His crying comes as a visitation,

the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly

as a nurse measuring drops of calamine

from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash

wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle

to see my father weeping this freely, weeping

for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again

because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate,

his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone

as the cold currents whirl around him—

crying one minute, sedate the next.

But today my father is disconsolate.

I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again.

I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade.

I hate myself for noticing his poetry—the triplet

that should not be beautiful to my ear

but is. Day, year, decade—scale of awful economy.

I want to give him his present but it is not mine

to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve

waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating

the moment we can open his present together—

first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it,

then me helping him peel back the paper,

the weight of his death knocking,

and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine,

I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,

every day I will know it opening in me.

Imtiaz Dharker, "Shadow Reader"

 

Imtiaz Dharker, photo by Ayesha Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film maker, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, Chancellor of Newcastle University. Her seven collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Shadow Reader. Her poems have featured widely on BBC radio, television, the London Underground, Glasgow billboards and Mumbai buses. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and also scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India. 

About Shadow Reader

Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy. The poems bind this looming curse to the occupation of countries, the earth and its creatures, those who own the story and those who redirect it through art or artifice. ‘Does the warp look back at the one who is weaving and say, This is not how I remember it…?’ Imtiaz Dharker’s collection pays attention to wilful erasures, exclusions and also to places of sanctuary. This is poetry as music, as momentum, as the texture and taste of languages, joyously sensuous and rich in images. While it acknowledges the everyday and its shadows, it is also an irreverent, playful celebration of life.

You can read more about Shadow Reader on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Shadow Reader, by Imtiaz Dharker

You write a window 

    

This is how you labour through the night

at the kitchen table, tallying up again,      

again, to get the merciless numbers right.

You weigh the loss against the gain,

the  plumbing or the heating, the buzzing thing

that has to be plugged in to work, switched on

to keep the household running. You are writing

your life in figures. He is gone                           

and you are awake in the sonnet of a window,

the chiming of a house where children come

and stay. The paper blazes white. The shadow

at your shoulder knows your will. This room,

this page is the sum of all you have to say

and all you have to give, you give away.

With empty hands

It’s life that is the visitor, it comes and goes,

a guest with many faces.

It flickers for a second on the face of time

and brings no gifts for the host.

Featured Poet: Helen Ivory

Photo by Dave Gutteridge

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. Her fifth Bloodaxe collection is The Anatomical Venus (May 2019). She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears and is a tutor for the UEA/NCW online  creative writing programme. Fool’s World, a collaborative Tarot with Tom de Freston (Gatehouse Press), won the 2016 Saboteur Best Collaborative Work award. A book of mixed media poems Hear What the Moon Told Me appeared from KFS in 2016, and a chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City was published by SurVision Press (Ireland) earlier this year. She lives in Norwich with her husband, the poet Martin Figura. Her website is http://www.helenivory.co.uk/.

About The Anatomical Venus
An Anatomical Venus is an eighteenth-century anatomical wax sculpture of an idealized woman, a heady mix of eroticism, death and biological verisimilitude. Venus could be opened up and pulled apart by all the men that studied her. She would give up her secrets the first time of asking. The Anatomical Venus examines how women have been portrayed as ‘other’; as witches; as hysterics with wandering wombs and as beautiful corpses cast in wax, or on mortuary slabs in TV box sets. A hanged woman addresses the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, a woman diagnosed with ‘Housewife Psychosis’ recounts her dreams to Freud, and a sex robot has the ear of her keeper. The Anatomical Venus imagines the lives of women sketched in asylum notes and pictures others, shut inside cabinets of curiosity. You can read a poem from the collection below, and see further details about the book here. 


The Hanged Woman Addresses The Reverend Heinrich Kramer 

To conclude. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.
Malleus Maleficarum  1486, Revs Kramer and Sprenger 

Do you cower in your crib at night
against encroaching evil tongues?
I picture you skittish inside your nightgown
as swollen tempests swoop upon your roof
and rattle the door you bolted thrice
against the dark invisible.

You said my womb knew such hunger
that I might devour a man entire.
Pray tell me in your clearest chapel voice
what tales they told you at the breast? 
A pretty Devil’s pact that would render
your creeping flesh delicious!

A sough of wind stirs papers on your desk.
You say women have weak memories,
then you shall be perplexed
that, despite my ruined body in the noose,
I recall each gnawing passage of your book.
When the sun awakens, they will cut me down.