The Remedies

By Katharine Towers

Katharine Towers' second collection is a book of small wonders. From a house drowning in roses to crickets on an August day, from Nerval's lobster to the surrealism of flower remedies, these poems explore the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. Towers also shows us what that relationship can aspire to be: each poem attunes us to another aspect of that world, and shows what strange connections might be revealed when we properly attend to it. The Remedies is a lyric, unforgettable collection which offers just the spiritual assuagement its title promises, and shows Towers emerging as a major poetic talent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781509813063

Katharine Towers

Katharine Towers was born in London and now lives in Derbyshire with her family. She has published two poetry collections, both with Picador. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. A poem from the collection ‘The Way We Go’ appeared as a Poem on the Underground and was also set to music by the composer Laura Stevens. Her second collection The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Katharine’s poems have been broadcast on Radio 3 and Radio 4 and have appeared in several anthologies, as well as in The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London. From 2016 – 2018 Katharine was Poet in Residence at the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Book preview

Baudelaire

I

The Roses

Because my father will not stand again

beneath these swags of Himalayan Musk

nor stare for hours to see which stems are safe

and which need tying back, I have it in my mind

to let the roses pull our house down slowly

for a hundred years. Then I’ll come back

to find its wreck of thorns and brick, my father

lying on the bed in which he died

and blinking in the petal-scented light.

Porcelain

clay rears up

wavering towards its shape

headstrong and fragile

as the new-born fawn

swaying at her mother’s flank

uncertain and certain

The Grasshopper

Origami made him from a leaf

folded into minute symmetries

of eye and wing, long hind legs

fitted for leaping and music-making.

One day he elbowed his way up

out of the mire to sing of love

and of his perfectly broken heart –

O, such meagre tinder for a fire!

The Chaffinch

His endless chink chink.

Pity his obsession:

all he knows is that he is

and he must say so.

If once or