Kith
About this book
Love, sex, boats and friendship. And yet Jo Bell's second poetry collection, Kith, is about so much more, as these bold and generous poems interweave bigger questions of place, identity and community and what these mean to us, here and now.
Delighting in the belting, beautiful turn-of-phrase, Jo Bell's poems are lyrical and joyous, but always precise and clear as birdsong. They take us the long way home, plot histories along the route of backwaters, and are occasionally diverted for a roll in the hay; hearts are broken and boats are dry-docked. There will be tears, but there will also be love, safe harbours, and the company of wise and faithful kith.
Jo Bell - archaeologist, boat dweller and erstwhile director of National Poetry Day - is a poetry pundit and deviser of online poetry community 52. Winner in 2014 of the Charles Causley prize and Manchester Cathedral prize, and placed in the Bridport, Wigtown, and Ballymaloe international competitions, she has had a fortunate year. She is currently building new projects with the writer Tania Hershman and poet Michael Symmons Roberts. Kith is her second collection of poems.
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Information
Table of contents
- Contents
- Crates
- Taken
- Like love
- Lately
- Shame
- I have not asked for this
- Cuntstruck
- Talking to myself
- Enough deathbed talk:
- Fig roll
- Muse
- No Seafarer
- Given
- Springtime at the boatyard
- Breaker’s yard
- Tied up
- Tixall Wide
- Frozen in
- How to live on a narrow boat
- My country
- Kingfisher
- Oiks
- Still life
- Boat in dry dock
- Lifted
- A crossing
- Severn, from Purton
- The archaeologist of rivers
- Eve naming the birds
- Infallible
- Gloriana
- A nightingale for Gilbert White
- Mallaig
- From here on up all the paths are informal
- Excavation
- Small finds
- Silbury Hill
- Mute
- My Schiehallion
- Waiting in Starbucks for Max
- Raising the roof for Kirsty
- Birdsong at the Rec
- Beginnings
- First, cause no harm
- Fair play
- February 21st
- Shibboleth
- Your Helens and my Jonathans
- Mowing
- Worship
- Whales
- The End
- A diet rich in birdsong
- Rooks over Avebury
- Begin
- Society of Friends
- Kith
- I will lift up mine eyes to the hills
- Acknowledgements