Pond by Sarah Westcott

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Pond by Sarah Westcott (Bloom, Slant Light) is a glimpse into another world, bright with dazzling language. Pond looks to the natural world with a keen eye, not just to capture it, but to write it into its own language. Ponds, rivers, and whales spin through this pamphlet, exploring something wet and complicated in the interaction between humans and the more-than-human, something that is sidled up to and, maybe, touched.

SKU: 978-1-7395051-1-0 Category:

Description

Published 26th February 2024

For days a white feather floated on the surface.

At some point a slug drowned quietly by absorption, its body leaking meaning.

I found a dead frog, almost dead, and laid it under the hazel’s leaves which were painterly, demented. 

A crow called, I called back and it was quiet. I tried to dent the membrane, I tried to swerve the vector (to feel ourselves inside another).

The wind curled and pushed me further down the road.

Something moved, kicked down deeper. Something like day and night —  those dancers on their long ropes —  

Extract from ‘Pond’

Pond by Sarah Westcott (Bloom, Slant Light) is a glimpse into another world, bright with dazzling language. Pond looks to the natural world with a keen eye, not just to capture it, but to write it into its own language. Ponds, rivers, and whales spin through this pamphlet, exploring something wet and complicated in the interaction between humans and the more-than-human, something that is sidled up to and, maybe, touched.

Poet Karen Mccarthy Woolf says of Pond “Sarah Westcott’s Pond is a mesmeric meditation on our most local ecology: the back garden. It worries at the surface and plumbs the depths: of language, of intuited knowledge, of matter and what it is to speak. It is nature poetry of the first order: full of music, beauty and metaphysical wonder; precise in its imagination and lyric flight.”

 

“The poems in this pamphlet create a water-human world of intersections.  Light, surface-skimming poems touch the page like mayfly touch the meniscus. To read Pond is to spend time in an alternative, delightful, curious universe.” — Jane Burn

 

“Pond is a generous and compelling inquiry. Here are poems steeped in close observation and empathy, played to a wild and inquisitive music – a deep pleasure to read. Sarah Westcott’s voice is intimate and witty, permeable enough to include water’s own borrowed inklings, pushing playfully against the limits of what it’s possible to know and to say of ecological habitats always on the move.” — Linda France

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