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Hand & Skull | Bloodaxe Books
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Zoë Brigley

Hand & Skull

Zoë Brigley

Publication Date : 23 May 2019

ISBN: 9781780374727

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Zoë Brigley’s third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.

'Brigley gathers up all the fragments of what it is to be a woman and weaves them together in this stunning collection which cuts and heals in equal measure.' - Laura May Webb in Wales Arts Review on Hand & Skull

‘Brigley’s voice is powerful, compelling, a force to be reckoned with, but what makes this collection particularly poignant is her refusal to let grief and tragedy become all-consuming… This poet writes with grace and honesty, boldly confronting what it means to be female in a world that conflates women and prey.  While Hand & Skull is concerned with violence, particularly violence against women, it is also a celebration of comfort, joy and light.’ - Mari Ellis Dunning, New Welsh Review

'Zoë Brigley is a poet I return to often – her third collection Hand & Skull is a tender exploration of gender, cruelty, violence, myth, motherhood and physicality. Misogyny and violence against women are topics I’ve always been interested in exploring, so this collection is particularly poignant for me.' - Mari Ellis Dunning, Poetry Wales (recommending poems that inspire her)

‘Running through the book are short poems, often not more than five lines, poems for, with and to, their “bones fan out to expand from a flat / cage: opening like an accordion’s bellow,” – which allow Brigley to show us something that we think we knew, did know and actually discover we didn’t. It’s a sign of a poet working with great control, craft that is so well executed you’re confident as a reader that you’re in very skilled hands. Lest it’s not clear, this is all to say Hand & Skull is a very good book.’ – Rishi Dastidar, Under the Radar

'The poems in Zoë Brigley’s Hand & Skull are strange-making, unsettling, and thrilling in their originality. Here Brigley bravely confronts what it is to be a woman in a world that sees women as prey, the “tautness of fear” enacted in the tautness of each line, each word. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work permeates the book, Brigley explores landscape and the body, often braiding the two: ‘I don’t know/ it now, but I am about/ to bend. The snap of a branch, or bone/ under a human hand.’ Hand & Skull is a brilliant book – and proof that Zoë Brigley is one of the best poets writing today.' – Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Hand & Skull examines the complex relationships between human and nonhuman lives as well as the ways in which gender informs these experiences. Brigley regularly uses epistolaries to establish dialogues, often addressing or personifying women of myth, literature, and history, such as Leda, Edna Pontellier, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Gender violence and violence against animals are often central concerns, but what makes the collection particularly compelling is its refusal to let tragedy be the only note it sings; many of the poems also embrace the complicated wonders of motherhood, of devotion. Hand & Skull  dazzled me with its agility and subtlety, its graceful inquiry into how gender, violence, myth, devotion and the natural world braid through our lives.’ – Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest

'In Hand & Skull the harrowing line between life and death is blade-thin – or rather, the life force and death fact are held together, in this poet’s hands, in the most visceral, affirming and clear-eyed of ways. I admire the dual impulse in these poems to acknowledge systemic violence against women (and other domestic animals) and to uphold the mothering instinct to make, nurture and – perhaps most courageously – witness the mortality of all living things. What a gift to accomplish all this while writing some of the most lyrically lush poems I’ve read in years!.' – Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore

 

Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin

USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org

  

BOOKS BY Zoë Brigley

Conquest

Zoë Brigley

Conquest

Publication Date : 29 Mar 2012

Read More   amazon.co.uk
The Secret

Zoë Brigley

The Secret

Publication Date : 27 Sep 2007

Read More   amazon.co.uk

Related News & Publicity

News & Publicity


Zoë Brigley Interview

Zoë Brigley Interview

Wales Arts Review podcast interview with Zoë Brigley about her third collection Hand & Skull; plus Writers' Rooms feature.

Read More  |  View All

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