Red Gloves

Rebecca Watts

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781784109554
• eBook ISBN: 9781784109561
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut The Met Office Advises Caution, Rebecca Watts observes and tests the limits of humanity's engagement with the non-human. By turns lyrical and narrative, the poems examine familiar subjects – environmental crisis, hawks, hospitals, the sea, barbecues, flowers, Emily Dickinson – only to find their subjects staring, sometimes fighting, back. Nature and nurture, equally red in tooth and claw, power a book-long sparring match between the overthinking poet and the ever-thoughtless universe, between the craft's isolation and the world's irrepressible variety. Gloves on and gloves off, the poet's hands destroy and build, gather and scatter, caress and strike.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Economics
• Definitions
• Red Gloves
• Amnesiac
• Music in Four Parts
• Having bled on a library book
• Salvation
• Sweet peas for the wedding
• Worship Not the Object but the Thing it Represents
• Surveillance
• A History of Minor Conflict
• When I was a girl
• Building
• Encore
• Notations for a Hospital
• Corridor
• Admission
• When all this is over
• Grasmere Early
• At the Sanctuary
• Gloucester, Massachusetts
• Matrimony
• Interns
• Glamour
• The Studio
• Forces Falls
• Oh, Susie, it is dangerous
• In the Poet’s Bedroom
• Sunflowers
• Barbecues
• The Desire Path
• Whereas
• Finds
• Be Careful on the Cobb
• Gratitude
• The Drawing Room
• Ancestry.com
• My Blue Period
• Small Acts
• Of an Honest Churchgoing Man Questioned by a Minister on His Deathbed
• There have been Movements
• At Bay
• That Sort of Note
• Peg,
• Bluebottle
• Should Anyone Be Left Alive
• Daffodils push through in the mild first days of January,
• Disappearing Act
• The Entangled Bank
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by Rebecca Watts, from Carcanet
• Copyright