Elizabeth Ridout

Summon

Elizabeth Ridout

£5.00 Buy now Recommend

Shortlisted   —Poetry Book Awards2020

‘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.

In the same series: Stroking Cerberus by Jacqueline Haskell; Memories of a Swedish Grandmother by Sarah Windebank; The Haunting of Strawberry Water by Tara Gould; Crumbs by Ana Tewson-Bozic and Cora Vincent by Georgina Aboud.

Buy the six Spotlight Books for £25.00 HERE.

Peter Carpenter

18 October 2019

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.

Patricia McCarthy

18 October 2019

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.

Buying options