Boudicca & Co.

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Author photo © Salt Publishing
	Jane Holland Boudicca & Co.
	Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist, editor and former professional snooker player, born in Essex in 1966. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her first collection, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, was published by Bloodaxe in 1997. A first novel, Kissing the Pink, followed from Sceptre in 1999. One of the top poetry performers in the Midlands, she lives in Warwickshire with her husband and five children. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844712892 ISBN-10: 1844712893 ISBN-13: 9781844712892 Author: Jane Holland Title: Boudicca & Co. Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 15-Nov-06 Extent: 96pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 6 mm Weight: 144 gms Supplier: Gardners Books Supplier: Ingram Book Group Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 9.99 Price: USD 15.95 Rights: World	See larger image PAPERBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£9.99~~ £7.99 20% off at the US Bookstore! ~~$15.95~~ $12.76	Short description/annotation: Sensual and politically engaged, Boudicca & Co.. drives narrative poetry in new feminist directions. It creates a cast of strong provocative female characters with complex agendas, centred around a controversial sequence of poems in the voice of Boudicca. A collection with a powerful sense of place and purpose. Main description: Jane Holland’s second collection, Boudicca & Co., is a provocative and vibrant exploration of women and their roles in society. The perennial themes of motherhood, love and sex jostle for space here with elegies, poetry written for performance, and Celtic-inspired mythological pieces. Richly allusive, these poems create networks between each other, tell stories, make music and ask unexpected questions of the reader. A collection with a powerful sense of place, Boudicca & Co. is located mainly within the British Isles, though not always in the present day. Often retrospective in mood, these poems deal with the poet’s own difficult past and with historical Britain, reinventing Celtic and Medieval stories and myths in particular. Yet there is also a Britain here that never existed, a landscape of the imagination, where a restless questioning spirituality tries to make sense of the gaps between expectation and reality. Sensual and politically engaged, Boudicca & Co. drives narrative poetry in new feminist directions, creating a host of female characters with strong individual voices and complex agendas. The title poem is a long ambitious sequence in the voice of Boudicca, disenfranchised Queen of the Iceni who leads the Ancient Britons in rebellion against the Roman settlers. It follows Boudicca’s transition from wife and mother to warrior queen, prepared to kill in the pursuit of freedom, blindly ruthless in her desire for revenge. The sequence explores the themes of national identity, personal betrayal and civil war with dark anarchic humour and an uncompromising starkness not for the faint-hearted. Meet the author Podcasts Play In Response to a Nude Photograph of Mina Loy, 1905 (1.6 MB) Play Hot Days in the Eighties (1.6 MB) Play Almost Iceland (1.5 MB) Play Gawain’s Horse (1.7 MB) Play Walks With My Father (1.4 MB) Play Desert Mother (1 MB) Play Red Star (664 KB) Play Boudicca’s Son (732 KB) Play Frozen (620 KB) Play A Handful of Bones (872 KB) Play War Games (840 KB) Play Driving the Tribes (1.2 MB) Play War Paint (516 KB) Table of contents: PART I Oyster In Response to a Nude Photograph of Mina Loy, 1905 Hot Days in the Eighties It was cool inside the chapel Elementals Bird’s Nest Love Song for a Gargoyle Green Man The Song of the Hare Gawain’s Horse Thanatos Heaven, To Be Out There, Under Dragon Woman The Wife’s Lament Year of the Nettle In Praise of Cannabis PART II My Mother’s Ashes Walks With My Father A Pair of Boots Whose Hands Were Made of Velvet Gravity Twins Warwickshire Fifth Apples Night Voyage Skull of a Bird Women’s Prayer Group, Coventry Benediction Desert Mother Resurrection PART III Deciphering the Rejection Letter Cyber Infidelity Anal Obsessive Books at Auction Night Blue Fruit at the Tin Angel IV BOUDICCA Red Star Not Exactly a Virgin Boudicca’s Son The Pleasures of Castration Frozen First Assault Flashback A Handful of Bones The Whole of Britain War Games Bewildered Dead Driving the Tribes Headless Woman War Paint Ghost Light Strong Hands Purification History Last Stand Doppelganger Magpie Suicide View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (440 KB) Excerpt from book: Fifth for Indigo Three days since the blood failed, and the test turns blue, a miniature sea between my hands, nine months to the far horizon. This must be a girl again, I'm sick as a drunk all morning and the world tilts when I walk like a ship sliding in a bottle. Twelve weeks and my waist begins to thicken. I can't hold anything down, and the boys are too heavy to carry upstairs. I meant to stop at two, then three, then a fourth appeared. Perhaps I could try hiding under the covers, or not washing. This stubborn foot wedged high under my diaphragm is more than a fish by thirty weeks: it's a rich pearl pushing against an opalescent shell, a poem, a number, sonic reality; refusing to be got rid of, cleaving like a shadow, part of me. Unpublished endorsement : Boudicca & Co. is a bold re-imagining of Britishness. Our contemporary England of Sunday roasts and cyberspace gives way to a wild and alien landscape, a place that Holland lays glinting before us “like a coin tossed in the sun / blunt-edged, foreign.” Steeped in myth and medieval poetry, this is a land of “ruins under rain,” hares, oaks, gargoyles and the Green Man. At the heart of it, embodying both Britain’s fierce beauty and its bloodied past, is Boudicca, and her voice is a startling achievement: modern, pitch-black, funny, and yet hauntingly lyrical. Jane Holland’s second collection is full of love and astonishment, a tribute to the resilience of women, to the power of literature, and, most of all, to: “England // my beleaguered sunken island.” Clare Pollard Unpublished endorsement : From versions of Anglo-Saxon to the unabashed lyric of pastoral, by way of the dragon women and velvet-palmed men of a new fairy-tale, Jane Holland’s Boudicca & Co is a book of adventurous, resonant inventions. As the title suggests, it offers a new view from the interior – of both country and psyche – in which history and geography are co-opted in effortless interplay. It’s a work of synthesis, and of poetic and emotional maturity, in which Holland emerges as a true craftswoman, a supple and graceful thinker with an effortless grasp of line, at the heart of the English lyric tradition. Fiona Sampson Unpublished endorsement : “—the grip/ of the wheel, a licence to roam.” Jane Holland’s poetry smoulders and blazes. Take your deepest breath, and go with her. Alison Brackenbury Review quote: In her unconventional aspect, Boudicca is peculiarly modern, and there are moments in the sequence, where modern wars and conflicts appear to be invading the ancient story. In ‘'Last Stand'', the woods are ‘'thick / with sniper fire'’ and Romans beat the men with ‘'rifle butts''. By breaking with the historic period of the tale, Holland comments on the repetition of atrocities and war, as if Boudicca is looking forward to the suffering and dehumanisation of twentieth-century wars. Zoë Brigley English Studies Previous review quote: Jane Holland discovered, more or less by chance, a passion and a talent for snooker. She entered a man's world where the battle to overcome bigoted rules and attitudes was as great as the battle to perfect her own skills in the field. She has turned her formidable energies and skills to poetry now with similarly turbulent and successful results. Maura Dooley Previous review quote: Jane Holland's route into poetry was the unusual one of snooker, in which she was briefly a professional … Snooker is actually a good metaphor for poetry: angling off the cush is like setting up a rhyme scheme, full rhymes give off a satisfying clack … Peter Forbes