SWALLOWING FEATHERS (2019)
FROM THE EDITOR:
“swallowing feathers asks of the reader whether the handwritten word might paradoxically evidence a more crystalline poetics. Operating at two levels, this remarkable and complex set of poems explores the possibilities of semantic disjunction, over and mishearing and daily, conversational language smashed against imagist poetics while being rendered in neat, characterful hand-scribed bursts. This pamphlet, resolutely a slim volume, asks what we learn about a poet from their pen.”
ABOUT THE SERIES:
To celebrate European Poetry Festival 2019, publications by contemporary literary and avant-garde poets have been produced in limited editions by London-based press, Sampson Low, bound by a celebration of contemporary literary and avant-garde Norwegian poets and artists. With both new translated volumes alongside conceptual collections, those featured represent the best of 21st century European literature and the kind of innovative, resonant and entirely individual poetics that define the festival and its programme. A partner of the fest, Sampson Low has been publishing since 1812 and led by artist Alban Low, specialise in boutique publications such as these.
An artist chapbook published by Sampson Low.
40 pages.
A5 format.
Part of European Poetry Festival Series 3.
Print run of 100.
Review by Richard Marshall:
“How to frame Torset’s coordinating metaphors, structures and orders? The poems are scattered like yellow petals of an anguished rose strewn over the feast table. First and probably last word: these are poems after the catastrophe, whose ‘shadows / are deaths or depth traps.’ The rest is speculation. And do we have to do that, speculate and expose? As she herself says, ‘Writing do I have to spell it out I extract myself / and wonder how little is needed before peeling / the self centred onion not concerned with weeping…’
[…]
She’s a war poet in just the sense that she’s still fighting a backwards extinction from Eden to Jerusalem. Like all the high modernists do. We can break this down into three parts: one, the upper/lower casement of her Nordic modernist hand; two, the deranged nitre of a staged Bataille pastoral reading of the mutable poet governed by fortune; three, the final wink to Belacqua, Beckett, Joyce, Dante and the hem line of pilgrim redemption. Whew! Are you kidding me? No.
[…]
Her scribbled out lines and changes of mind act as visual markers of uncertainty and introspection and this suggests a living mind that pushes back fixed thoughts, or even the very notion of completion. Meaning is both constructed and deconstructed as forensic assertion and acerbic self-doubt. She employs scribbled out lines as a poetic tool, turning inside out the stability of language, and inviting the reader into the vulnerable spaces between the written and the erased.”
Full article: 3-16am.co.uk