Kathryn Bevis's Flamingo introduces us to a troupe of wild, unique, and captivating poems. Here, Bevis treats a range of subjects including work, survival, love, and mortality. Flamingo brings us into encounter with life and our own embodiment: our births and deaths, our struggles and joys, doing so with humour, dynamism, and spirit. Formally inventive, using forms from the ghazal to the gram of &s, all the poems take startling and original angles on their subject matter. There is humour and biting wit undercutting the sexual politics in 'Wonder Woman Questions Her Status as a 70s Symbol of Female Empowerment.' There are surprising metaphors and surreal narratives that uncover difficult truths and painful experiences, as in 'Teddy' in which a teddy bear stands in for an abusive partner. There are moving poems, too, about romantic love and family. Bevis is never afraid to explore complicated feelings for loved ones: for example in 'Knitting Nan-Nan,' in which the poem's speaker knits her grandmother back to life. Often, animals are companions on the journeys that these poems make. Starlings speak in a collective flock to remind us that individualism is not the rule for all creatures. A squid trapped in a fridge echoes the collective lockdown of '2020', and the grieving rituals of animals illuminate a human separation. Cancer is posed as a ring-tailed lemur, capering through the sufferer's body, and the titular 'Flamingo' imagines death as a flamboyant transformation where the speaker shapeshifts into the afterlife by becoming a flamingo herself. Altogether, Flamingo is worth reading for its remarkable originality. Every poem in this book is a discovery and a joy.
Kathryn Bevis is a poet and poetry teacher, founder of The Writing School Online, and was Hampshire Poet 2020-21. She is the Selected Poet for Magma (the Solitude issue) and her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals, including: Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, Wasafiri, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Bad Lilies, The Interpreter's House, Broken Sleep Books, Under the Radar, and iamb; they have also featured on BBC Radio 4. In 2022, she co-won the Mairtin Crawford Award for Poetry, was a winner in the Poetry Society Member's Competition, won first and second prize in the Second Light Poetry Competition, came second in the York Poetry Prize, been commended in both the Hippocrates Prize for Medicine and Poetry and the Verve Poetry Competiton, shortlisted for the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competiton, longlisted for the National Poetry Competition, and her pamphlet manuscript was highly commended in the 2021 and 2022 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition. In 2019, she won both the Poets & Players Competition and the Against the Grain Competition. Kathryn designs and delivers Poetry for Wellbeing courses for adults in mental health settings, substance-misuse recovery settings, and prisons and she is the editor of two anthologies of poetry by new and emerging poets. She is working towards her first collection. Her debut pamhlet Flamingo was published by Seren in October 2022.
Title: Flamingo
Author: Kathryn Bevis
ISBN: 9781781726938
Binding:
Publisher: Poetry Wales Press
Publication Date: 2022-10-03
Number of Pages: 30
Weight: 0.0610 kg
A stunning and original pamphlet... inspiring, impressive and wonderful. - The London Grip. Kathryn Bevis writes visceral, moving, sharp-eyed and formally adventurous poetry, often focussed on the embodied experience of women's lives. But despite the quick wit, bite and sting of these poems - Bevis clearly couldn't be paid to write a dull line - the deeper impression is of a poet of real wisdom, compassion and fearlessness, with an almost old-school faith in poetry as way of shedding light, of making sense of the most senseless aspects of the world. Only a writer of considerable gifts could repeat the trick so consistently. - Don Paterson. This pamphlet is a delight - vibrant and fresh. Each of its poems, from the tenderest honeymoon address to the bold, inventive voices of its heroines, zings with vivacity and defiance. Never shying away from what is hard or painful, these poems keep rebellion as their lodestar, conjuring an energy which shines with wit and compassion. - Liz Berry. These are poems of brilliant ideas and even better execution. The pages sing in a range of voices, giving us the thoughts of superheroes and union representatives, dolls and starlings. Every language choice the writer makes pulls in the same emotional direction, and this leads to poems of the most enormous power. At their heart, they express what nothing can like poetry - empathy and love - and their feeling for a husband, a mother, a grandmother, even for a long-lost and bereaved former schoolfellow, make us glad to be human. By the end of the collection, with its sustained group of poems exploring love and mortality, I was in floods of tears, and convinced that this is the most accomplished and emotionally significant group of new poems I have read in a very long time. The pamphlet reminds us why poetry is so important, and will be clutched to the hearts of all of us who are lucky to read it. - Jonathan Edwards. If a poetry collection could ever be a box of fireworks, it would be this one. From the first stanza, where Wonder Woman's breasts are described as 'twin spaniels off the leash' we know we're in for a high-stakes, high energy ride in this extraordinary collection. The description of cancer as a ring-tailed lemur is just one example of the way Bevis always sidesteps expectations to create poetry that is moving, transformative and always surprising. - Kim Moore.