A01=Janet Sutherland
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Author_Janet Sutherland
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British poetry
Category1=Non-Fiction
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COP=United Kingdom
countryside
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farming
Language_English
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Price_€10 to €20
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Product details
- ISBN 9781848616431
- Weight: 171g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Jan 2019
- Publisher: Shearsman Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In her fourth collection Janet Sutherland explores the farm where she grew up; a 90-acre dairy farm in Wiltshire, rented by her parents, where they milked 50 cows and reared heifers on the nearby water meadows. The collection examines the farm as home from early beginnings to the farm auction at the end of their working lives. It is a poetry of landscape and water, of birds, beasts and other creatures, of life lived cheek by jowl with death, of memory and forgetfulness; all of it rooted in place. There's an engaging inventiveness of form: a disused water mill reveals poems in its old bricks, the drowner revels in his craft, the work of the farm is observed with rigour and lyricism, investigating the uses of memory and landscape as routes to understanding. The final sections zoom outwards, challenging us to look at earth itself as a home farm.
"a snowy field with silent rooks and seagulls
as in our awkwardness as in endurance
There is no consolation in this work but the courage it requires of you to read on to the end and, when you have, the place of quiet repose it leaves you in.
There is a tact, a tender truthfulness, that leaves language alone and lets everything touched on speak for itself. In `Pepys and a nightingale' her father takes her out to hear the nightingale: `It's plain, he said, `plain brown, just listen'. Years later his daughter returns the compliment in `Measures of distance', her account of his death, so delicately done you hold your breath as you read.
Though generously inclusive in its referencing and recycling of a wide variety of texts from `the real world' - family letters, a coroner's report, a bill of sale of all the stock and tackle of a dairy farm, even a literature search conducted by an AI - in the end this is a poetry from which `all the shadows the reflections / the deceits have passed'. I cannot offer it higher praise than that." -Gillian Allnutt
Janet Sutherland was born in Wiltshire and grew up on a dairy farm. She has an MA in American Poetry from the University of Essex. Her poems are widely anthologised and have appeared in magazines such as Poetry Ireland Review, The New Humanist, The London Magazine, The New Statesman and The Spectator. In 2018 she received a Hawthornden Fellowship during which some of these poems were written. Home Farm is her fourth collection.
