Elastic Glue

Poems by Kathy Pimlott

“The island has been left to dormice, foxes, hives
and the water plant. An old Peace sprawls,
flushing yellow to pink. The rest has gone over.
Across the bridge it’s biblical: plagues lay waste
to fruit and crucifers and just when you thought
you’d escaped, a wet spell incubates late blight.”

– from ‘Site of Special Scientific Interest’, in Elastic Glue.

Page count: 36

Publication date: 28th February 2019

Paperback ISBN 978-1-912915-07-1

Kathy Pimlott

Pimlott’s collection, the small manoeuvres, was published by Verve Poetry Press in 2022 and she has two pamphlets with the Emma Press: Elastic Glue (2019) and Goose Fair Night (2016). She has been published widely in magazines, online and anthologies. Her poems have been longlisted, shortlisted and placed in competitions including Magma’s Editors’ Prize (2019); the Poetry Archive’s WordView 2020 Collection; the National Poetry Prize (2023), the Rialto Nature and Place Prize (2023) and the Buzzwords Competition (2023). She leads workshops in-person and online. Pimlott was born and raised in Nottingham but has spent her adult life in London, the last 45+ years in Covent Garden, specifically Seven Dials, home of the broadsheet and the ballad. She has been a social worker and community activist, and worked on a political and financial risk journal, in arts television and artist development. She currently earns her living as the administrator of a charitable trust which undertakes community-led public realm projects.

Description

Here you’ll find revellers, developers and dealers circling the city’s glitzy heart, Lenin inspecting Swedish allotments, and people hanging on to housing as the city tries to squeeze them out in the search for ever more profit. Elastic Glue is a pamphlet rooted in place, looking critically at the intersections of who and what we share our spaces with, and what that means.

This follow-up to Goose Fair Night examines the ways we own and are owned by land – how we both make and are made by the places we inhabit. Kathy Pimlott explores this through poetry which is sharp, lyrical, always political, and sometimes just exasperated.