Kelptown - Watts, Carol

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Résumé :
Carol Watts was until recently Professor at the University of Sussex. Her writing attends to lived and often hidden and entangled histories of extraction, migration and community, from weedy marginal land (Dockfield, Equipage 2017) to the planetary (Sundog, Veer 2013 and Where Blue Light Falls, Shearsman, 2018). Her most recent poetry collection Kelptown (Shearsman, 2020) explored the UK south coast as a hallucinatory and adaptive zone of inundation. Her last, Mimic Pond, documents the life of a seasonal pond on London's Blackheath, a place associated over centuries with protest and gatherings....

Biographie:
Carol Watts lives between London and Brighton, where she is Professor, and Head of the School of English, at the University of Sussex. Her publications include the collections Sundog (Veer Books, 2013) Occasionals (Reality Street Editions, 2011) and Wrack (Reality Street Editions, 2007), and the artist's book of prose chronicles alphabetise (2005). She has also published several chapbooks with Oystercatcher, Torque Press and Equipage, and often collaborates in inter-disciplinary works with dancers, musicians and artists.

Sommaire:
This is poetry at the edge of the land, but also at the edge of our horizon. Kelptown is Kemptown, so we are on the south coast of England. But this is not a poetry in which borders are fixed. What we are given instead is a language of continuities, lines of contact and connection that conventional place-making keeps from view. We are standing at the shore, knowing that the waters are rising, but knowing also that our only hope is to situate ourselves in a radically different way. Carol Watts gives us a poetry which lives, and shows us how we can learn to live, alongside fellow species, which allows us to register again what we walk among. It is a poetry of loss and of an intense politics of loss: we are given 'DeExtinction Poems' and 'Notes on a Burning World'. But is also a poetry that knows it must 'make a home/ on friable shores, built from inundate truths'. These beautiful lines are from the book's title sequence, where Watts raises the Thoreau-like question: 'How do I live, tenant among your long fronds'. More than ever we need our poets to help shape our answers to such questions. And Carol Watts' imaginary is a most crucial response. Written across the past decade, through what can seem like the end times, these are poems that open us to new relations with the world. -David Herd ...