Seahorse Publications
New Publications:
In this remarkable debut collection, Jen Dunn explores what it is to be as a child, a lover, a surgeon and a psychiatrist. Her precise, lyric poetry examines ‘the pulse bright moments of life’ that happen in the midst of death, trauma and enduring. She writes movingly of her father’s death – ‘hot tears pulled from bolted seams’ and pays tribute to a medical colleague – ‘the cold precision of the job only ever warm with you’.
Much of this collection is an interrogation of self, and of the push and pull of her medical background – ‘do I step back or step into your grief?’ This powerful collection makes the ordinary extraordinary in poems that touch on everyday situations - ‘Smokers Outside the Hospital’ as well as those only experienced by the poet herself. Here are patients, friends, colleagues, family, selkies and fellow commuters in the hurly-burly of what it is to be alive ‘and we grow into our rings, the trees and I’.
(Lynn Valentine, poet)
‘Throughout 'The Sounds That Men Make' Allan Gaw, like a ethnographic cartographer, maps the difficult, often treacherous and at times absurd landscape of contemporary masculinities. Inhabiting diverse personae and positions, including alien observers, he navigates the sensitivities and conundrums, the bonds and the rivalries, contradictory role models, the inherited behaviours and prejudices, internal conflicts, the joys, desires, the fears, along with the silences and struggles to overcome expectations and stereotypes. Gaw presents a topography of masculine voices, asking which we identify with, which we recognise, which we react against, and in doing so opens up a much-needed discussion on what it means to be a man in the 21st Century.’
(Bob Beagrie, writer)