Menagerie

By Cheryl Pearson and Amy Louise Evans

Menagerie is a collection of poems about animals, divided into three sections: water, earth and air. Some poems examine a creature from close-up, almost allowing the reader to see the world through the animal's eyes, while the poet is more present in other poems, looking on. The collection invites the reader to reflect on loneliness, love, mortality, and hope. Each poem is typeset with plenty of space around it, allowing it to breathe. With stylised illustrations by Amy Evans.
from "Octopus Tank, Torbay Aquarium"

I saw a ribbon of starlings once – they rose

and fell in that same way, tied and re-tied Rome

in a bow, and I thought the knot at their centre

must be God. Here is God again in this stranger,

the colour coursing her billow and flop like a weather map

crawling with storms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912915392

Cheryl Pearson

Cheryl Pearson's first poetry collection, Oysterlight, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. She is the winner of the 2016 Cheshire Prize for Literature and the 2017 Torbay Poetry Competition, and was Highly Commended in the Costa Short Story Awards (2017). She lives in Manchester and spends her free time in the Peak District where she can usually be found climbing hills or drinking beer.

Book preview

cover.jpg

For my mum, Lynn, and my sister, Deb.

We three Peas x

THE EMMA PRESS

First published in the UK in 2020 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © Cheryl Pearson 2020

Illustrations copyright © Amy Evans 2020

All rights reserved.

The right of Cheryl Pearson and Amy Evans to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-912915-38-5

EPUB ISBN: 978-1-912915-39-2

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the UK by The Holodeck, Birmingham.

The Emma Press is an independent publisher dedicated to producing beautiful, thought-provoking books. It was founded in Winnersh in 2012 by Emma Dai’an Wright, and is now based in Birmingham. The Emma Press publishes themed poetry anthologies, single-author poetry and