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Biographical note: Siān Hughes is a lone parent who lives in the middle of nowhere with her two young children and works part time as a teacher and in a book shop /cafe. In 2006 she won the Arvon International Poetry Competition with The Send Off, an elegy for her third child.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844714988
ISBN: 9781844714988
Author: Siān Hughes
Title: The Missing
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BB
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 28-Apr-09
Extent: 64pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 4 mm
Weight: 96 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: IP
Price: GBP 12.99
Price: USD 23.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: SHORTLISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION FORWARD POETRY PRIZES 2009
Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. These poems are clear, direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery, but head right for the heart of shame, laying bare the terrors of parenting, loss, regret, and falling in love with the wrong people.
Main description: SHORTLISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION FORWARD POETRY PRIZES 2009
Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2006 ‘The Send-Off’, an elegy for a lost child, was broadcast on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and the issues it raised — ante-natal testing, grief, guilt, the family, women’s lives — raged on for weeks in blogs and notice boards. But no one wondered what the poem was about. It was crystal clear. The poems in Sian Hughes debut collection, The Missing are direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery. They deal head on with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people.
Table of contents:
The Double at Highbury
Catalogue
Secret Lives
The Girl Upstairs
Taxi
The Greedy Man
Easy
Noises Off
The Sacking Offence
Sleepwalker
Saltpetre
Fidelity
The Stairs
Shikseh
Propaganda
Results
You’re
The Night Bus
Everybody Knows
Cursing the Holy Ghost
Country Compilation
Cartoon
Delivery
Flood
Electricity
Aitken Drum
Mengy Babies
Fireworks on Ward 4C
Dyslexic
My Children
Bear-Awareness and Self-Defence Classes
The Fight
Superking 6 x 6
Xperiment!
Sleep Training
The Send-Off
Sweet Ghost
Storm Clouds
Humpty Dumpty (Egg, or Gun)
The Missing
Nativity
The Return
Magnetic Fish
I Turn Forty
What If
Your Advice
Delete
The Places for Crying
Broken Sonnet
The Theories
Falling for Elvis View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample (51 KB)
Excerpt from book:
What If
What if I changed my name, put on weight,
dyed my skin, shaved my head, stopped drinking,
got a new job, a nose job, got into debt, painted
everything bright yellow, moved to another country,
cut out my tongue, grew a new one, grew thinner,
younger, happier, wiped your memory and my own,
drove myself off a cliff, rewound past the beginning
stopped, and started again? What if you were drunk
in a distant seaside bar, and I came in, disguised,
and never turned to face you? Would you, then/
What if I promised nothing would be the same?
What if you made the promises? What then?
What if I never moved from this corner of the room,
never called you, heard you, saw your face again?
Unpublished endorsement: Most minds retreat form the scenes of our greatest fears: from the children’s ward, the hospital graveyard, the defeat of love. Siân Hughes, on the contrary, advances, with the flaring senses and clear eyes of a writer intent on her proper subject. These fine, bare, desolate poems are the result; each one as arresting, rare, and compelling as the truth. Kate Clanchy Unpublished endorsement: Siân Hughes’s voice moves us because she manages the difficult art of putting wit to the service of strong feeling — a rare achievement. Hugo Williams |
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