Summon

By Elizabeth Ridout

'This dazzling series shows that if the barriers can be vaulted there is true beauty to be had from the lesser-walked streets of literature. These works are both nourishing and inspiring, and a gift to any reader.' —Kerry Hudson
The experience of living with the adventures and griefs of bipolar disorder forms the focus for this remarkable collection of poetry.
Ridout uses the language of the fairy story and visceral images of the female form and femininity to explore how personal trauma and instability makes their mark on the wider world. Different voices and twisted accounts of the body and mind are combined with the mythological and the esoteric to create striking, beautifully unsettling and unusual poems—each a celebration of the extremes of being human.
Spotlight Books is a collaboration between Creative Future, New Writing South and Myriad Editions to discover, guide and support writers who are under-represented due to mental or physical health issues, disability, race, class, gender identity or social circumstance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Myriad Editions
• Release date: Jan 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912408436

Elizabeth Ridout

Elizabeth Ridout has published her poetry and reviews in Agenda, where she was recently Broadsheet Poet, and in various other publications online. She studied English Literature at Oxford University, and she won a Creative Futures Literary Award in 2017. She lives in Tunbridge Wells.

Book preview

Praise for

Summon

‘A rich mix of character study and personal narrative, which masterfully walks the line between imagination and truth.’

—Dean Atta

‘Here is a fresh, strikingly original, distinctive first collection. The strong, gutsy poems – each a well-crafted entity in itself – demonstrate a striking young talent worth noting. In her already assured voice, with teasing overtones at times of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Carol Ann Duffy, Elizabeth Ridout demonstrates her wide range. The heady mix of surreal touches versus the almost brutally real, updated classical and literary allusions, and the arresting lexis leave the reader ‘breathless’ with awe.’

—Patricia McCarthy

‘Elizabeth Ridout’s debut collection is a dazzling mix of daring and accomplishment. The confessional elements in her work are presented to her readers with a restraining craft that gives the candour of approach and rawness of subject matter memorable utterance. Ridout works from a range of settings and voices, and incorporates a raft of influences (from Patti Smith to Anne Sexton and the Beats), but she makes these distinctively her own. We enter Ridout’s world to feast on the sudden awakenings/and spiralling moments, as she has it, in poems that fizz off the page.’

—Peter Carpenter

‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!’

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Contents

Title Page