Thoughts of a Soo

I love the feeling of being eager to explore a poet’s work and Elisabeth Horan‘s latest book Just to the Right of the Stove was a collection that had held me eager since I first heard about it prior to its release.  The thought of a poet creating poetry based on imagined conversations with Sylvia Plath certainly captured my interest. The poet promised us poems which centred on motherhood, insanity and genius and that is exactly what this book holds. Having heard Elizabeth Horan read from her previous collections I knew the poems would be heartfelt and have the power to sear. And sear they did.  I like poems to grip me from first reading and pull me back to them straight afterwards. There are poems in this book that certainly do that. ‘Keeping Tabs’ creates vivid imagery with lines such as “I go deep, I go dark... My children have learned not to listen when I yell… We know she's nuts…” The poignancy of this poem resounds as the reader reaches the end which then leads to that feeling

Some of the places 'Magnifying Glass' has landed...

On one of the days in which I accidentally dried my eyeball with a towel after my shower the pain started a thought process about hotel towels and hotel rooms that led to a sudden urge to create a poem. Energy levels being high I also decided it HAD to be a palindrome. I first became excited by the form when I read Caroline Bird's 'Drawn Onward'. If you love poetry you have probably already read it, but if for any reason you haven't then I highly recommend you make it one of the next poems you read. I was ridiculously pleased with myself when I created a short palindromic poem about fiddlehead ferns in summer 2020 and sort of thought it would be the only one I wrote so imagine how pleased I was to create a second! I hope it will find a home of its own, but in the meantime here's my 'fiddlehead ferns' kindly homed by 192 Poets Directory :   We Few Deified We Few   Wanting us to feast differently     I filled a basket with fiddlehead ferns right to the