Latch

By Rebecca Goss

Rebecca Goss' fourth and most ambitious collection, Latch, is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love, and loss with compelling particularity. The book is various, unpredictable: memory and magic interweave, secrets tangle with myth. As in her earlier books, Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents' and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters. The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county's stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800173224

Rebecca Goss

Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, won the Poetry category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2013, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. In 2014, Rebecca was selected for the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation Poets. Her second pamphlet Carousel, a collaboration with the photographer Chris Routledge, was published by Guillemot Press in 2018. Rebecca's third full-length collection, Girl, was published with Carcanet/Northern House in 2019 and shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2019. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD by Publication from the University of East Anglia.

Book preview

Latch

Rebecca Goss

CARCANET  POETRY

FOR MY PARENTS

‘and I, in my brand new body,

which was not a woman’s yet,

told the stars my questions’

anne sexton

from ‘Young’

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Hounds

Nest

Stars In a Field

The Pact

Cousins

The Farm

Rooks

Blacksmith, Making

Darlin’

At the Party I Shadowed Susie

What Will It Be Like To Be Here?

Woman Returns to Childhood Home, Carries Out an Act of Theft

My Father Gave a Cockerel to Jack Bruce

After Harvest in the Eighties

We Saw Deer

Sister, with Mole

Weir

Close Work

State of Being Young

When It Feels Hot, That Rage Against Me

Woman Returns to Childhood Home, Finds Herself Amongst Others

Deathwatch Beetles

The Retired Agronomist Drives a Tractor in the Summer Because He Likes the Oily Smell of the Machine

Creosote

Pheasant in Rear-View Mirror

Your Thumb at the Latch

Lane

Bricks

Pictures of You

Bales

Blessings

Sylvia

That Afternoon, On Her Bicycle

Rearing

Woman Returns to Childhood Home, Remembers

Under a New Sky

To Love a Gambrel Roof

Arger Fen

Violet

Makers of Ladders

Life Expectancy

We Walk This Avenue of English Oak

There Was a Swing

I Hear This Ringing From My Home

Field Fire

We Are Buried Under Lime

In Song Flight

Gate

Reprise

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

LATCH

13

The Hounds

It’s as if something

calamitous is coming.

Their lament

rising across fields,

its claim on the dawn

keeping all the birds silent.

I want to know what stirs them,

the force of this pack.

What causes them to stand,

muscled frames trembling,

throats full of baleful song.

I am wakeful, rapt

and disrupted, their bays

sonorous against glass.

Should I slide the thin pane,

push my upper body

into emerging light,

let them scent out my sex,

tell them

we are all afraid.

O this night, this bidding,

claws at the latch,

pure thunder of them running,

my mouth opening

to the cool

and agitated air.

15

Nest

The cygnets draw a crowd

before they are born.

Mother swan’s occasional

rise to nudge her ovate crop,

beak slow and practised

at the turning. Father swan

circling, rearing at dogs.

We return to see one,