Sweet Anaesthetist
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cinnamon Press
Published:7th Sep '20
£9.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
Jay Whittaker's debut collection, Wristwatch, won the 2018 Saltire prize for Poetry Book of the Year. In this eagerly awaited follow-up, Jay explores themes of origin, asking what shapes us most: our biological heritage or the societies we find ourselves born into? Her work draws deeply from the landscapes of the Hebrides and East Lothian, from the natural world in general. Yet, often, it returns to the fleshly bodies we inhabit and through which we experience everything — as in her debut, in Sweet Anaesthetist Jay discusses the frailty of the body and the task of living with cancer — but she also turns outwards, to beings encountered and too easily overlooked in the rush of the day-to-day: friends, acquaintances, the smallest creatures with which we share our days. Culminating in the prose poetry sequence, 'Egg Case', Sweet Anaesthetist is a vibrant, transfixing plunge into the stuff of life itself.
"Mingling disarming directness and imagistic restraint, Jay Whittaker's poems expand outwards from deceptively diminutive proportions—little bombs-for-the-soul of love, grief, anger and empathy. What occurs in or inhabits the peripheries of day-to-day life—from used contact lenses and garden birds to overseas military interventions—is brought centre stage in writing which powerfully demonstrates the urgency of alertness to things often cast off as disposable, or passed by unheeded. 'Have some respect. Look,' the landscape demands in 'Eyrie'. At once generous and unflinching in its vision, Sweet Anaesthetist tasks the reader to look more closely, and more flexibly, too—to lose, or at least loosen their grip on, 'the phrasebook / for the language of home'." — Miriam Gamble
ISBN: 9781788640831
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown