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A warm and snouting thing

A warm and snouting thing

£4.25£6.50

A warm and snouting thing is a pamphlet of poems by Ramona Herdman.

“It was the buttons, luscious as sex,

mother-of-pearling down her back.

It was the run of buttons made you want to look

under and undo them with a jade-handled buttonhook.”

Page count: 36

Publication date: 14th September 2019

Paperback ISBN: 9781912915293

Ramona Herdman

Ramona Herdman lives in Norwich and is a committee member for Café Writers. Her pamphlet Bottle (HappenStance Press) was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2018 and one of the Poetry School’s Books of the Year 2017. She won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2017. Her first collection, Come what you wished for, was published by Egg Box in in 2003.

Description

A warm and snouting thing dances delicately between the sizzle of sex and the ambiguous stability of commitment and family. These poems emphasise the physicality, not only of desire, but of the human and natural worlds which surround and shape it. Herdman’s voice is always precise, even at moments of the most brazen intimacy.

There are tales of teenage self-confidence and adultery averted – but there is space here, too, for a settled life with a salad spinner, and a long-term lover’s belly. The poet skilfully negotiates the twin pulls of the familiar and the unknown, generating a forceful and compelling charge from the energy of flight resisted.

Ramona Herdman’s ‘A Warm and Snouting Thing’ is also good on carnal desire and delight, as well as the sexual politics, hazards and humiliations that have a habit of accompanying them. Gloriously unbuttoned about lots of things – ferns, armpit hair, eyebrows or cigarettes, and indeed the way buttons can be “luscious as sex” – Herdman’s verse and voice confront the reader with a rare, unapologetic gusto. – The Times Literary Supplement

‘Here, language is like the body—sprawling, unpredictable, dangerous—but ultimately given poise and control through humour, acuity and self-awareness.’Sabotage Reviews

Watch Ramona Herdman read from A warm and snouting thing:

 

Author

  • Ramona Herdman

    Ramona Herdman lives in Norwich and is a committee member for Café Writers. Her pamphlet Bottle (HappenStance Press) was the Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2018 and one of the Poetry School’s Books of the Year 2017. She won the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2017. Her first collection, Come what you wished for, was published by Egg Box in in 2003.

Additional information

Dimensions 12.9 × 19.8 cm
Format

Print, eBook

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