Abi Curtis

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Biographical note:  Abi Curtis writes poetry and fiction and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Sussex, Brighton, where she also completed a doctorate in Creative and Critical Writing. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2004 and her work appears in various magazines and anthologies.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715657
ISBN:  9781844715657
Author:  Abi Curtis
Title:  Unexpected Weather
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  08-Jun-09
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  WINNER OF THE CRASHAW PRIZE 2008 Abi Curtis makes the familiar extraordinary, and the supernatural everyday. In poems about animals and clouds, scientists and circus performers, about love and bean-pods, about bruises and myths and the moments before death, her deft use and playful subversions of form give her verse an exquisite poise between gravity and lightness. Unexpected Weather has surprises on every page: sensuous surfaces upturned with a single word, moments frozen and held up for inspection, riddles, mishearings and tricks of the light. The collection is divided into two parts, each of them named for just such a trick: a mirage and a phosphorescence, the one an illusion, seemingly real, the other quite natural, but spectral and eerie. Both create atmospheric effects no less beautiful for their irreality. They are perfect figures for Curtis’s poetry, for her way of conjuring characters, worlds, mythologies and histories out of wisps of experience; but most of all for her delight in metaphor, the medium of condensation and transformation, in which she makes the world limpid, and new.

Table of contents:
I: Fata Morgana
Lady Jane Grey
Loom
Death by Lightning
In-betweens
Fata Morgana
Body Baskets
George Gabriel Stokes
Soliloquy of a Molecule
Trapeze Artist
Lupercalia
Hong Kong
Rays
Tantric
Cloud
Hitching
Last Words from the Bluebird
II: Ignis Fatuus
Mole
Tyndall’s Flame
Bruise
The Cupboard
Plastic
Lion-Tamer
Poem at the Edge of a Cliff
Bareback Rider
Michelangelo’s Meals
The Ghost of the Nature Reserve
Owl Butterfly
The Allotment
Mycelium
Electricity
Humbug
Oz
Roundhouse
Mandibles
Bean

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Excerpt from book:  

Loom

It comes slowly on a web of mist.
Enlarged and indistinct, billowing
on easy gales dropped like stones
through the water of the wind.
It comes slowly through a weave of indigos
and greys, the warp and weft
of the dawn weather,
sliding the sea into the land.
I view the guillemot and wonder,
how loom can name its meat,
as well as that which towers over,
that which weaves?;
and who might eat a flying thing?
Spread the spindles of its wings,
split its crying beak and glean
only a breast of flesh
from beneath a film of feather.
It comes so slowly
stretching its limits
like milk in a bowl of water.
So slow, it moves backwards.
While I wait, I watch the twist
of a blue-furred caterpillar
inseparable from its own white wires.
The sun shuttles overhead
and as the boat approaches
it shrinks to take an outline that suggests
my dark room turned inside out,
the overlaying drift and push of us,
the reconciliation of our silhouette.

Unpublished endorsement:  To read Abi Curtis’s poems is to enter a world where the infinite possibilities of language are spread before you like a sumptuous feast; where each flavour and texture is a surprise and a delight. With her exuberant, unfettered imagination, passion for the natural world and fascination with the places where science meets poetry, these luminously imagistic poems give us characters facing execution with their ‘creamy spillages of silk’; and where voices are assigned to molecules, moles, lion-tamers and the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. She marvels at what the world has to offer and offers it back to us with stunning clarity and confidence.

Catherine Smith

Previous review quote:  The work delighted me at times, able to capture claustrophobic and breathlessly open experiences, all with a very personal eye, looking at the self in private and social contexts.

George Ttoouli
Gists and Piths

Previous review quote:  Curtis never tells you things you already know — she tells you things you are, things you’ve always felt and have never managed to put into words. It’s wondrously satisfying — like being broke then finding a twenty pound note in an old pair of jeans.

Luke Kennard
Exultations and Difficulties.

Previous review quote:  Matching Humbug’s thematic strength is a structured symmetry and clarity of purpose it would be hard to miss.

Kate Bingham
Poetry London