Growlery

By Katherine Horrex

Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2021. Growlery conjures a place haunted by flooded villages, broken ankles, ovarian health and factories. It dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country, the human and the natural. Here, Brexit is a city with streets 'worn into themselves like grafted skin', corpse flowers bloom in America, and urban foundations crumble into cisterns. Horrex - whose poems found an enthusiastic readership via Carcanet's New Poetries series - unpicks the illusion that order upholds society and reveals the true ramshackle complexion of things. Her debut collection reimagines the 'growlery' of Dickens' Bleak House by looking at the concept of internal space in a twenty-first century which is both connected and disjointed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781800170537

Katherine Horrex

Katherine Horrex has worked as a processing clerk in a bank, a mail sorter, a book reviewer, an assistant editor, and a proof reader of forms filled out by mystery shoppers. She now runs a small business making and selling ceramics, online and at markets. Her poems have appeared in PN Review, Poetry London, the TLS, and others. Growlery is her first collection.

Book preview

KATHERINE HORREX

Growlery

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Mainframe

Four Muses

Goat Fell

Brexit

Landgrab

Parliament, Fallen

House of Other Tongues

Autonomous Landfill

Afraid is a Town

Bottle Kilns

Buttermere

Pareidolia

Omen

Iron Trees

0:03 AM

Seven Flooded Villages

Potter’s Wheel Song

Grey Natural Light

Lightlorn

Doorway

Motor City

The Gentrified Water

Clever Puppeteers

Looking at the Sculptures

Lapwings in Fallowfield

Inner City Suburb

Eyepiece

Undertow

Wood Frog

Polycystic

Small Batch

Starlings / Slow Shutter Speed

Chimney

Waking in Twos

What Farm Is This?

The Farm of a Thousand Crops

Out of Place

Moon Jar and Moondark

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

For my family

GROWLERY

MAINFRAME

Light the colour of deep-sea fish

tacks down fibre optics.

If you could peer down the lines

and see through the neon

you’d discover molecular numbers.

In cladded glass tubes, where numbers

swarm and are desperate to pixelate,

I’m only a blanched thing searching.

At the line’s other end,

your face a satellite dish.

FOUR MUSES

What to say to my muse the power plant

who makes auras for the city’s night hours

with a sputter of wattage and volts?

What to say to my muse the steelworks

who sends hot blasts down the standpipe

for fig trees to thrive in?

What to say of the pigments

rolled out in testing chambers

by my latest muse the chemical plant?

What to say when the power plant

hums and clicks and shines

like a