Full Description
Life Immediately is a pacy, dynamic debut collection containing all the preoccupations of Lily Blacksell's work, from womanhood, to music, to the natural world and our calamitous dealings with it, to the calamity and comedy of human relationships, romantic or otherwise. Blacksell's writing showcases the expansiveness of language, but also its failures: communication builds up and breaks down, geese honk, hangovers linger, in eclectic, formally confident poems where observation is balanced with insouciance.
Contents
9 Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye
10 Better Things
11 Bring Down the Birds
12 Hang On
14 The Pangs
15 Barrels Upright
16 Will I Ever
18 Compliments Please
19 The Ballad of Standing a Chance
21 Seamus Heaney's Eyes Were Small But I Knew a Seamus Whose Eyes Were Bulging
22 The One About the Woman Overboard
24 Loose Lips
25 Hand Claps
26 Noontime Newtown
28 More Where That Came From
29 Ulysses
31 Mistral
32 Well Done, Emma
34 Fear Yourself
35 The Causeway
37 An Unsuitable Landing Place
38 Rude and Natural
40 One Day, Maybe Next Week
43 The Hell with It
44 If You're Thinking What I'm Thinking
47 Lamp Poem
48 Even On This Hill
50 Royal Jelly
52 Toft Barn Dream
53 Thus To Be Shifted from One Person to Another
54 Four Donkeys in a Paddock
56 Mr Right Is Hot Responsibly
58 Long Walks in the Dark and Handsome
60 Show the Ferret to the Egg
62 Pigeon Coo Farm
63 Far Be It from Me
64 Our Landlady of the Lord Louis
68 Frog
69 How Can I Make It Taste of Something?
70 Glastonbury
71 And Then, Let's Call Her Chloe, Turned Up
73 Withying
74 Nice and Straight and Tall
75 Bounty
77 Now You Listen to Me
79 I Cannot Expect You to Understand Me Without Examples
