Search results for ""author zoë brigley""

Zoë Brigley’s third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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These creative nonfiction essays consider girlhood, motherhood, violence at home and abroad, violence against women, the consolation in writing, trauma, and redemption. The essays celebrate and interrogate popular and literary culture: for example the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Alun Lewis's love letters, David Bowie's `Life on Mars', or the poet John Burnside's writings about his abusive father. These timely meditations on women, ethics, and writing bring insights that only an immigrant and traveller like Brigley could provide.

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Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Moving from the violent to the erotic, "Conquest" describes women questing to rediscover their own desire. Split into three sections, the collection begins in the 19th-century England of the Bronte sisters, travels through the vast continent of the USA, and finally finds the answer to women's longing in a walled garden in the decorous city of Paris. In America and Europe, the heroines struggle against the conquest of bodies and of place, facing issues like miscarriage, lost love and domestic violence. Consolation comes, however, by discovering their own desires and independence. The collection begins with 'My Last Rochester', a sequence devoted to the Bronte sisters and their struggle to meet expectations of them as women, lovers and wives. The English Gothic gives way later to a story of American immigration in the title-sequence. 'Conquest' pans to the wide open spaces of the USA, where pioneering women still quest to satisfy the sweetness of their own longings. Such satisfaction is only unravelled by retreating to a walled garden in the final sequence, 'The Lady and the Unicorn'. Original in its use of form, "Conquest" questions the brutal aspects of Western society, especially violence against women and the colonial mind-set. Inspired by the tapestries at the Musee Cluny in Paris and the artwork of Victoria Brookland, the poems visualise women rediscovering their own pleasures, desires, loves. Bridging the personal and the universal, Conquest offers a compelling vision of healing and consolation.

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Poems by 60 poets involved in The Practice of Poetry course( students, tutors and visiting poets)at the University of Warwick from 2000 to 2010; poems arranged alphabetically, with an introduction by David Morley. Poems by Peter Belgvad, Zoe Brigley, James Brookes, Phil Brown, Peter Carpenter, Swithun Cooper, Jane Holland, Luke Kennard, Anna Lea, Michael McKimm,Glyn Maxwell, David Morley, Jon Morley, Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, George Szirtes, George Ttoouli, Simon Turner and others.

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