Feeling All the Kills

Reviews / Votes

'Helen Calcutt's Feeling All the Kills is radical, revolutionary, fearless in depicting women as sexual and maternal. These poems carefully record how women's bodies can be dominated and controlled in the intimacy of the bedroom and the cold light of the hospital room when they give birth. This is something that we have to recover from, and these poems are extremely moving in mapping out that path from experiencing traumatic assault to opening to a lover, to one's own child. Finding that closeness is life-altering, illuminating, astonishing: discovering the "quick light inside of me". Calcutt's poems have a descriptive power which illuminates a story that so many women will recognize and understand. How to trust and open up after violence. How to be autonomous and safe after violation. It is possible, these poems tell us: "I have become / my own hands holding. / My own eyes seeing // what strange and curious / newness, / what beauty."' Zoe Brigley, author of Hand & Skull 'Feeling All the Kills is about how trauma shapes the soul. Calcutt bears witness to a life "dazzling and damaging enough", in which tenderness is always haunted by brutality. Her imagery reveals how sexual violence imposes itself upon the everyday, so that even the trees seem to have their hair "roughed against headboards". But these poems are also fierce and beautiful in their resolve to heal. Helen Calcutt has talent to burn.' Clare Pollard 'Who else does this? Calcutt's is an otherworldly stutter, a slipping-in-and-out-of visceral vulnerabilities, a speaking-at-the-brink-of utterance and archetype, where love, sex, childbirth, mothering all loom and lean with darkness intact. Plath hovers in audible range; Sharon Olds, too, murmurs; but Calcutt's bell jar comprises an altogether smokier, metaphysically more refractive glass.' Mario Petrucci 'Feeling All the Kills is a generous, powerful book, helpful for both poets and for those who have been wounded. There is no toxic optimism here - just truth, body and life, which, Calcutt reminds us in 'Listen', 'is beautiful and damaging enough ... dazzling and damaging enough.'

Mslexcia, Reading for Writers