Full Description
'then we are fish' is a hybrid collection of poetry,
prose and short stories, showing wide, tonal range.
The
organising metaphor is water, from Slipstream to Horizon in 12 sections — tidal,
coastal, the pull beneath the surface. The emotional territory is memory,
parental and filial love, loss, survival, identity under pressure. The tone
moves between the intimate and the mythic. The setting is predominantly urban
and British — working class Midlands, London, bus routes, galleries, ordinary
streets, but the register is not realist. There is darkness but also moments
of unexpected lightness and warmth.
Poems
often centre around women in states of quiet resistance or self possession: the
mother in Lineage, or the woman in Diorama, the dancer in Flame,
a seamstress, or a woman on a bus. They are never victims in any
simple sense. They are people navigating constraint with varying degrees of
grace and fury. That's a consistent and serious ethical position running
through the collection.
The
preoccupations are clear and deep — inheritance, shame, containment, the
distances between people who love each other, time as erosion, private worlds
unwitnessed by others. These aren't imposed themes but genuine obsessions that
surface differently across each poem. The collection is unified by sensibility
rather than subject matter. The codas found at the end of the darkest sections,
often witty, absurd, relieve the weight in just a few re-orienting lines.
