|
ALICE'S CAT
Poems by Anne Grimes
_________________________________________________________________________________
Anne Grimes lives with her husband and brought up her family in an old mill house in a secluded river-valley in West Wales. Before moving there she taught in London, and since then has always written poetry, but the move to Wales with its strong poetic tradition was a defining influence on her work. Alice's Cat is her first full collection of poems.
“Anne Grimes belongs to that rare endangered species of writer whose poetry is the real thing. Clear of current fashions for pointless sentimentality, inept irony or indecipherable chopped-prose, her poems are distinctly rewarding narratives in which music and meanings linger. Form meets feeling here, and thus the subtle truths and artful sensuousness of these poems make for a fine first collection.” Alexis Lykiard
“Anne Grimes brings to her subjects an observant eye, an intelligent heart and a keen ear for a cadence or a rhyme. Her poems are personal but never self-centred. Her themes are universal - love, desire, grief - but never abstract. The originality of her view is exemplified by the group of poems in which she observes the lives of teenagers in small rural and seaside towns. Upon the lost kids in these shabby places she shines her tenderest language. This is a generously human collection of poems in a voice that deserves to be heard.” Gillian Clarke
_________________________________________________________________________________
Killing Time
By the mart steps in the main square
girls of thirteen, fourteen
giggle in groups, wait to be seen,
flick and toss their mermaid hair,
flaunt their saunter, prink and pause,
catwalk past in the latest gear,
cut-off tops the thing this year
on midriffs frail as drinking straws
while boys with empty eyes
and nothing else to do
drive round and round the one-way
dragging on fags, their lives
on a tread-wheel, purposeless
as riders on a wall of death.
Sometimes four together,
cabined, they pass and pass.
Traffic lights loom through diesel air.
Arthritic sigh from an artic's brakes.
At the thump, thump of a megawatt bass
a girl near the kerb may fold to a car.
Over the estuary a flare of sunset.
The passenger outlines her lips with a slash,
scarlet on white. The gash
is shocking, a slick of blood on concrete.
_________________________________________________________________________________
ALICE'S CAT
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: Bruce Grimes
Publication: AUTUMN 2003 (87 pages laminated paperback)
|
