Rosie Garner

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Biographical note:  Rosie Garner lives and works in Nottingham where she runs writing workshops in such places as caves, buses, and a garden shed. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies. She has been writer in residence on Nottingham City Transport, and HMP Whatton. She spends as much time as she can in her writing shed. This is her first collection with a real publisher.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715183
ISBN:  9781844715183
Author:  Rosie Garner
Title:  The Rain Diaries
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Feb-10
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:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  This is no tricks poetry — it stands as witness, chronicles of lives lived without safety nets, mostly from the point of view of people living them. You might not like these people much, but, after this, you’ll know them if you see them. And one of them might be you.

Main description:  The Rain Diaries is a book you’ll want to hold on to, accessible without being easy. It’s poetry that makes you think and feel. Words without the blinkers. At times, it says the unsay able with a power that kicks you in the chest. Within this collection there are people you’re already aware of even if you’ve never met them, because these poems reflect worlds glimpsed at odd angles that de-familiarise the well known, and make the unfamiliar recognisable. There’s genuine love in here, love of a city as well as a partner, and there’s blood lust here, and mob violence. There’s the magic of conception along with messed up relationships and the bitterness of failure.

This is a rainy day book, it’s like sitting in a café in town, not the pretty one that does latte and panino but one that does a nice line in tea and toast where you can sit invisible, watching people pass for as long as you like.

This is no-tricks poetry — it stands as witness, chronicles of lives lived without safety nets, often from the point of view of those living them. You might not like some of these people much, but after this, you’ll know them when you see them. One of them might be you.

Table of contents:
Part One: Home Ground
Tigguocabauc
Rain
Football on Vernon Park
Chasing the Ace
On Every Route
We’ll See After a Fortnight
Speed Bumps
Interglacial
Graveyard Shift
Part Two: Climate Change
Things I’d Like To Say
Black Box
Climate Change
After the Tsunami
The Last Car
The List
Part Three: Prison Diary
Day One
Officer
First Person
The Folk Singer
Toe By Toe
What He Says Is
Smoking Ban
Substantially Enclosed
Part Four: Demolition
How To Begin a Person
Boy
Thirteen and a Half
Summer of Rain
Like Dyslexia
Tomb Raider
Cleave
Demolition
Wrong Word
Part Five: The Maze
Every Thursday
The Maze
On Football and Killing Chickens
Winter Solstice
The Naming of Plants
Separation
What if the Ransom’s Set Too High?
Castaway
Lost and Found
The Wind
You Tell Me That the Dead Are Dead

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Excerpt from book:  

Substantially Enclosed

I’m chain smoking outside The Dragon,
substantially enclosed on two sides,
a white walled corner facing the fire escape,
receding rooflines, four chimneys neatly stacked.
Behind them, a sky, belatedly blue,
and beside me, a bunch of flowers so huge
people eye me with suspicion,
think I’m trying to sell them. But I’ve left my job,
it’s the end of something, a release date.

In the prison, men set out chairs in a semi circle
and read to each other. Big men, sweating with nerves,
wires exposed. And then the clapping, which was real
and a kind of triumph, but it all feels like the end game.

I’m thinking of the spider guarding Tate Modern
on pincer legs, of how I looked up once,
between them, to the tendons on Millennium Bridge.
If she hatched the eggs she carries, they’d cling
together for a while, staples ripped from magazines,
then they’d trust to the wind, stick to St. Paul’s,
The Eye, scutter down drains on Fleet Street.

I walked the North Bank, drawn to the muscle of water,
felt its desire to rise so strong, I had to look away,
study instead, the idle lapping at Blackfriars Bridge.
And that night, back outside the Tate,
the spider blackly fronts projections of future tides,
blue-lit lines on buildings around London,
the drownings to come.

Unpublished endorsement:  Rosie Garner's poems explore a territory that often gets ignored, and she achieves a lyrical mix of toughness and tenderness that's hard to pull off.

Ian McMillan

Unpublished endorsement:  Rosie Garner’s poems inhabit named urban streets, buses, football matches, corner shops. People who accuse poems of not reflecting real life could not say so of these. But the best poems do more than “say what you see”, they make us see it more sharply, unlike the couple in the pub who unwisely “ignore old Harry in the corner”. It’s always a mistake to ignore Old Harry, and these poems are very aware of his role in the world, yet they also see redemptive possibilities, like the man who finds, in illness, a new depth to his marriage.

Sheenagh Pugh

Unpublished endorsement:  Rosie Garner's poetry speaks for the city-dweller as a friend and observer. Her Poetry on the Buses showed an eye for the urban undergrowth and an ear for the unlikely, voicing the experience of passengers and passers-by. She writes with humility about her own experiences, casts light and shade into emotional corners, and brings her work alive at readings with disarming honesty and a twinkle in her eye. I was delighted to include her in two anthologies I edited: A Tale of Three Cities and Lifemarks, and hope that she will now find support in the wider publishing community.

Jo Bell