September Reads

By Kim Moore

I’ve just spent the weekend in Blackpool at what felt like very close quarters with Storm Amy. The TV aerial blew off the hotel we were staying at, the waves were very dramatic and Blackpool did that thing where the sand from the beach and the foam from the waves covered the road and the pavement along the front. We mostly avoided the storm though - after deciding that Blackpool Pleasure Beach was not a good idea, we went to the Sandcastles Water Park and then hit the arcades the next day.

My twin sister and I in our birthday jumpers

Despite the weather, I had a very nice weekend, and having something planned helped me to avoid the usual existential crisis I have around the time of my birthday.

September has been a very busy month, even though in my head, I thought it was going to be a quiet and relaxing month. My daughter goes back to school, university teaching doesn’t start till the end of the month etc etc. How wrong was I? September has kicked my butt. At university, I’ve had MA marking to do, a very busy induction week for new students and planning for this year’s teaching and two grant applications to work on.

I’ve also been working on the edits for my next poetry collection with my lovely editor and am now onto the next stage - which is copy edits. This is probably my least favourite part of the process - mostly because by the time I get to the end of a project, I really have to make myself focus, and also because I am ridiculously indecisive and given the first chance will sit and worry about whether I should use a comma or not all day. However, I do have to get these copy edits done by Tuesday next week, which is good for me as it means I can’t sit and procrastinate too much.

As well as all this, I’ve hosted an open mic, a poetry event, done an online poetry reading (thank you to all the lovely paid subscribers who came and supported me - if you would like to retrospectively catch that reading - you can find it here (if you are a paid subscriber), ran a workshop for Literature Wales, took part in an Annual Review for a PhD, chaired a PhD, and attended and took part in the BBC Contains Strong Language Festival.

I write all of this out because it is the only thing that makes me realise why I’m tired, and why I’ve not read as much this month! Anyway, here are my rather thin on the ground reads for this month - two poetry collections that I would absolutely recommend.

Breaking a Mare
Christina Thatcher

This is a fantastic collection, published by the wonderful Welsh press Parthian Poetry. The poems are lyric poems that stand on their own, but they also tell a wider, fragmented narrative of a girlhood spent on a farm, amongst horses. It’s a book that revels in the physicality of writing about work, and perhaps unusually - women’s work on farms, and it’s also a story of daughters and mothers and the difficulties and love that exists between them.

The first poem is called ‘Welcome to the Barn’ and the barn is both backdrop to many of the poems, and a character in its own right. ‘Welcome to the Barn’ is instructional - it tells the reader to ‘Picture its broom-swept aisle, varnished stalls, / leather saddles, solid silver clasps’. Later, we are told to ‘picture young girls with their braided hair’ and later the mares and the girls become interchangeable when we are told to ‘see them: pretty girls braiding their hair, / the mares brushed smooth and shiny’. By the end of the poem, when we read ‘How good they are, these bright young girls’ it’s not clear whether the girls are horses or human. In this way we are made complicit because of what we really see, what we know can or might happen without being told. We know about the possibility of young girls being exploited, of being seen as property, as less-than-human, about the way threat moves in the space of barn, of the way young girls are both looked at and are displayed, and display themselves.

I have so many favourite poems in here, and was heartened to see that a poem from the collection has been included in the 2025 Forward Prize anthology. Another favourite of mine is “Unearthing” - an amazing poem which recounts a teenage sexual encounter and finishes ‘it is only now I realise my body / was not the fuel in this story but the canary / the snuffed silence…’

The canary image references the practice of keeping canaries in coal mines. The birds were the first to collapse if poisonous gas was in the air, thus giving miners time to evacuate. My body has always been a canary, the first place I feel anxiety, the place where the impact of emotional difficulty is felt. I had a difficult week last week and the place I felt the stress was in my stomach as constant nausea. All we can try to do is be both the miner and the canary, to sense the danger and to rescue ourselves.

If you would like to order this collection, you can find it over at my Bookshop.org account here.

Lives of the Female Poets
Clare Pollard

I have been waiting for this collection to come out ever since I first heard about it, and it does not disappoint. Incidentally, I think Clare Pollard was the first poet I ever saw perform live. Clare came to Ulverston to read for “A Poem and a Pint”, a wonderful reading series that ran for many years (more on this in another post!), and this happened to be the first poetry reading I’d ever been to. I’ve just googled it to find it was back in 2006. I don’t remember much from that night, other than being utterly astonished by Clare’s reading, and particularly by the subject matter of the poetry, which felt utterly daring in its exploration of female experience.

So back to Clare’s latest book, The Lives of the Female Poets, her seventh poetry collection with Bloodaxe. Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets gets taken to task here. The first poem does not shy away from anything either - Clare gets stuck in straight away with “Poetess” - exploring its use as a ‘derogatory term’, pointing out that ‘it’s true that the adjectives ‘feminine’ and ‘Poetess’, / when modifying poetry / can be exchanged either with ‘minor’, ‘popular’, or ‘sentimental’ / without injury to sense.’ The ending of the poem is fabulous - we are left with an image of the Poetess at the ‘female empire of the tea-table, /where She sweetens the tea /with sugar’s tender hiss.’ I love that the ‘hiss’ of the final line picks up and echoes ‘Poetess’ and ‘sense’.

This book takes us on a dizzying journey from the grand heights of Inana - an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of war, love and fertility to a battle between a mother and the head-lice that infest her children’s hair. How many poems are there about this battle that perhaps all mothers have gone through? I’m not sure but I thought this one was fabulous - dark and playful and funny and disturbing. And also delicious to find out that the oldest known sentence in the earliest alphabet was inscribed on a 4000 year-old ivory comb and is ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard’. That the first known sentence is an act of care is wonderful.

I enjoyed every single poem in this collection, and enjoyed the feeling of meeting my literary ancestors - some of whom I knew - Sappho, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Bishop - but there were plenty I didn’t. I’d not heard of Praxilla for example, and the beautiful fragment of her writing that we are left with.

If you would like to order this book, you can do so here

And that’s it - my September reads! Small but perfectly formed. Thank you all for reading!

You can also order Clare’s book (and their other collections) direct from Bloodaxe here

You can order Christina’s latest book (and her other collections) direct from Parthian Books here