Andrea Porter

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Biographical note:  Andrea Porter is a member of the Joy of Six Poetry Ensemble that has performed in the UK and the USA. She has been published in a variety of poetry magazines in the UK, Canada and the USA. She received an Escalator Award in 2005 and an Arts Council grant in 2006. She is also a fiction writer and has had short stories published and has recently completed her first novel. Her pamphlet Bubble was adapted for BBC Radio 4 by the playwright Fraser Grace. She writes a blog, We Liked It but not Quite Enough.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715091
ISBN:  9781844715091
Author:  Andrea Porter
Title:  A Season of Small Insanities
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  These poems introduce voices that clamour to be heard. The language is vibrantly now, the context the everyday but at times things are a little skewed, as if something slightly odd has been glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. The poet inhabits a world where angels comment on tea towels in a gift shop, Medusa travels on the train, Emily Dickinson waits for a phone call, a woman has dinner with Goya’s polished skull. However reality is brought sharply into focus by the trafficked east European girl, the Zimbabwean immigrant woman, the carer, the sex chat line worker, the people in the all night petrol station.

Every emotion that make us fully human, including humour, weave through this collection. The poems mirror life and show us who we are, who we could have been and who we might become. In the final section we are drawn into the world of personal trauma and loss. This is the mirror we would rather walk away from and yet the scalpel-like precision of each word, the light touch of the language beckons us in as if we already know that the ‘you’ watched in this sequence could easily be us, if we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This book has a compulsive and vital authenticity, after reading it you feel that you have been on a journey with the poet through a strange yet also oddly familiar landscape and have arrived somewhere well worth visiting.

Table of contents:
A Season of Small Insanities
Mystic
Laying On of Hands
Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition
Room
Eves
Traffic
Visitors’ Book
Sodom Cookery
DIY
Sharp
Fighting the Bit
Unstable Particles
Venus and Cupid and a Man Playing a Lute
Orosia Moreno
Head
Room Service
Night Porter
North Sea Women
Night Shift at the Petrol Station
Asleep at the Wheel
Zimbabwean Singer Detained in the Fenland Immigration Centre
Postcard From Jerusalem
Heike with her Dictionaries
Mrs Stenman on her Newspaper House in Pigeon Cove, Massachusetts
Azrael Visits The Angel Shop In Edinburgh
The Last Vertigo
Assassinations
Boxes
Three Haiku for a Saint
Man Insults Veiled Medusa on the Tube
Hands Free
American Carnie Freaks, 1902
Shaman
Heart FM
Plane Ride
Picking Things Over
Continuity Girl
Spindleruv Mlyn Bus Station
‘Pray for Our Hometown Heroes in Iraq’
At Emily Dickinson’s Grave
Yield
II Marrying Richard Harris
Clockwork
Chat
Snow Night
Handling
Elegy
Black Hole
Altered State
Double Act
Marrying Richard Harris
Life Boats
Home Help
Caskets
Service
Second Hand
Registering
No Returns
Crossing

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Excerpt from book:  

Marrying Richard Harris

This was not what you wrote in your diary
when you were twelve years old.
Not this holding of a second dead child
in a room next to the scrape of plates,
all those uneaten fish Friday lunches,
the drumming of pipes in a busy sluice.

I will marry Richard Harris.
Sing on Top of the Pops.
Not bite my nails.
Fill a country house with children.
Write a book. Have pierced ears.
Drive a car.
Live in Ireland by the sea.
Wear jeans all the time.
Adopt stray cats and orphans.
Own two wolfhounds.
Ride a horse better than Christine White’s.
Travel to one name from each page in my atlas.

This was the hope list in HB pencil,
your future plans in neat joined-up writing.
You rock him and cry as is called for.
Marrying Richard Harris would have avoided this,
stopped this falling apart
in a space set aside for the purpose.

Unpublished endorsement:  Like her Shaman, Porter draws survivors and ghosts about her, and with a hawk's eye for happenstance of living language, she rewrites myth, catching the white of Shiva's eye, acknowledging both chaos and random kindness, harm and hilarity. She heeds the overlooked – the child contaminated by radiation, the immigrant coaching herself in her new life's story, the girl who gives sales advice on vibrators, the women who sells phone sex, night porters, long distance drivers. For Porter, there is no taboo and this is her poetry's most generous gift. “Life is in the detail. Death is in the detail.”

Jen Hadfield

Review quote:  The fascinating cut glass surfaces of her work, always tug against an undercurrent of darkness and violence.

Jo Shapcott