Half-naked in her ankle-length dressing-gown,my mother is battling with mosquitoes —or not so much battling with as bowing to —the phalanxes of bloodthirsty mosquitoesthat whine their high-pitched whines in her hairand will not let her sleep. Not a chance.Mosquitoes have got too many legs.They’ve come to give her elephantiasis.They like to breed in buckets. They say zvuv.They think that what they say explains everything.
Zvuv
Selima Hill
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Selima Hill, Women in Comfortable Shoes, (Bloodaxe Books, June 22, 2023)
Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters on farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 40 years. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1986, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University in 2003-06. She won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with part of The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1989), one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which also includes work from Saying Hello at the Station (1984), My Darling Camel (1988), A Little Book of Meat (1993), Aeroplanes of the World (1994), Violet (1997), Bunny (2001), Portrait of My Lover as a Horse (2002), Lou-Lou (2004) and Red Roses (2006). Violet was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK’s major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Bunny won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lou-Lou and The Hat were Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
"If this is miniaturism then it is miniaturism on a macro scale. Like a vast and dazzling stained glass window, perhaps, made up of many individual elements, both compelling and bewildering. Iridescent, with a kind of disturbing blankness about it, too."
– Susan Mackervoy, Acumen
"Surging with shrieks of pain and howls of laughter, these poems transform life’s inevitable mundanities into the fizziest, memorable moments."
– Jo Clement, PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2023
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