This is Sarer Scotthorne’s first collection, published by Hesterglock Press in January, a ruby which dropped into my palms at the Bristol launch of Boscombe Revolution 3.
These poems demand to be read in one go; the pages are bursting with movement, quaking with emotion and physicality, fighting to break free of their constraints.
They wrangle with the stuff of life, of our closest relationships: grief and anguish; disappointment and despair; longing and desire. There is no holding back – the language is forceful, honest to the point of brutality, making for a challenging but visceral one-sitting read.
Scotthorne negotiates the loss of her father, the shock of the grief, invoking the myth of Oedipus in in her sequence, Poison
“down the lead pipes, rattling the fragments left in shattered windows.
A token from his once industrial; I bound a shard of glass and searched
The urine-scented halls until found his sleeping body on a shock of Ragwort.”
From Scene 1. Alone
Imagery juxtaposes machinery and corporeality, combined with inner city landscape; the decay of industry, concrete images of the mix of human detritus from sweat to beer cans, with perennial weeds- nature’s creeping into the liminal spaces we barely notice but recognise as part of our environment in contemporary urban life. Places of transformation.
Saraswati Murmurs, which is beautifully scored on the page, offers respite from the aftershocks of grief and seems to be a point of letting go:
“step onto soft mud
and slipped under the water I wanted turned
water my body…”
Blood runs through this collection as the red thread of life. Cold metal and warm blood. Blood as a signifier for wounding and loss, of fear; blood as a threat; blood as heat; blood as contamination; blood as life; blood as acknowledgment of a beating heart, of reawakened desire; as life giver and as revival.
The Blood House is a courageous journey, pulsing with truth. Read it.
LucyFurLeaps 