Name: After the Rites and Sandwiches
SKU: 9781915628329
Price: 4.25 GBP
Availability: InStock

After the Rites and Sandwiches

£4.25

Burley Fisher Bookshop Books of the Year 2024

“Heartfelt but clear-eyed and technically assured, this is a powerful and moving collection by a remarkable poet writing in extremis.”

~ Peter Sansom

Centred on a sudden accidental death – its shocking actuality, the aftermath, the admin – Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet is an honest, lyrical and nuanced journey through the complexity of bereavement.

As the world around her continues on – moths remain attracted to lights, Christmas comes and goes – Pimlott lives with the irreplaceable absence that follows the loss of a partner. Amid the pain and emotion is a streak of wry humour at the mundanity of settling affairs and a powerfully personal trajectory of moving through grief rather than moving on.

Across poems that take stock of the things people leave behind and the sometimes-painful memories of a long and textured marriage, After the Rites and Sandwiches tracks the rollercoaster of grief, guilt and regret without losing sight of the enduring salve of love.

Cover by Mark Andrew Webber.

Page count: 36

Publication date: 7 November 2024

Paperback ISBN: 9781915628329

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

Praise for After the Rites and Sandwiches

“Heartfelt but clear-eyed and technically assured, this is a powerful and moving collection by a remarkable poet writing in extremis.”

~ Peter Sansom

“More than a distilled exploration of the mechanisms and processes of grief, here is a sequence of elegies that double as love poems, dissecting with painstaking precision a long and complex relationship. Shot through with Pimlott’s trademark combination of the quotidian and transcendent, this musical and metaphor-rich work will – in the best possible way – break your heart.”

~ Jacqueline Saphra

“These poems are good travellers, too, though delicate and unusually haunting… This is a good poet, with a clear and distinctive voice… a fine wordsmith… she reaches places other poets do not go”

~ Helena Nelson, The Friday Poem

“I think the immediacy of poetry lends itself well to exploring what it feels like to be left behind after a death and this pamphlet is an excellent example of this. Not a very festive recommendation, but hopefully helpful to whoever needs it.”

~ Burley Fisher, Books of the Year 2024

“[Pimlott’s] bravery in collating this pamphlet is astonishing and makes it compulsive reading […] Pimlott’s work is ever brilliant, ever shocking, ever honest.”

~ Nicki Heinen, London Grip

“Poetry readers and writers will find much to inspire them in Kathy Pimlott’s evocation of the internal and external landscapes of loss, through her craft. For anyone bereaved, this is an accessible, companionable collection which I hope will find its way to that wider audience”

~ Jenny Hockey, Orbis (212)

“A compelling pamphlet, full of tenderness, regret, bewilderment and loss. Writing about the aftermath of a partner’s unexpected death, each poem is a piece of a shattered world; Pimlott’s effort to reconcile the once-known to the now-strange. And so Pimlott’s language here is that of solace, not challenge: refamiliarisation not defamiliarisation.”

~ Magma (92)