The Iron Bridge
Published on 28. March 2024
128 pages
978-1-80017-395-8 (ISBN)
Description
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025
Highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2024
Rebecca Hurst's first collection bridges memory and observation, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it. The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images - from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.
Highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2024
Rebecca Hurst's first collection bridges memory and observation, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it. The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images - from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.
Reviews / Votes
'Rebecca Hurst writes as a naturalist, a daughter rolled up into dirt like a woodlouse, a mother, the forest, a snowy singer. She's my favourite unreliable narrator. Words are good but touch is better. Take The Iron Bridge. She'll let you walk ahead. Be pinched by the links. Take a scalding sip. Be magicked back to life.'Carol Mavor 'One of the great pleasures of these poems is the way in which Parson's Wood is intimately known through such precisely placed language.'
Judith Willson
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
File size
0,76 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-395-8 (9781800173958)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Rebecca Hurst is a writer, opera-maker, illustrator and researcher based in Greater Manchester. Her poetry has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Carcanet's New Poetries VIII. She is the author of a poetry pamphlet, The Fox's Wedding (Emma Press, 2022). Rebecca has a PhD from the University of Manchester, and is co-founder of the Voicings Collective, an ensemble that devises new music theatre, and teaches creative writing in schools, universities, museums, and the community.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Contents
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- The Iron Bridge
- Rough Music
- I: MAPPING THE WOODS
- Walking Dwelling Thinking
- Pentecost
- Dark Peak
- Desire Lines
- Mapping the Woods
- I. Winter solstice
- II. Spring equinox
- III. Summer solstice
- IV. Autumn equinox
- Lismore
- Llyn Ddu/Black Lake/Lindow
- Bridgewater
- The Land
- Banksy Wood
- Wone
- II: THE STRANGER'S CHILD
- Hide & Seek
- Teeth
- The Unreliable Narrator
- Fire Song
- How the Fox Lost his Brush
- Singing Together
- The Animal Bridegroom
- Hermeneutics
- The Art of Needlecraft
- The Needle Prince
- Her Unbreakable House
- And then we saw the daughter of the minotaur
- The House Opposite
- Three Women Around the Table
- Cabbage
- The Giantess
- III: NIGHT JOURNEYS
- Elegy
- Rosamund
- Niht-sang
- Sibir'/??????
- Field Notes, 1
- First Day (That I oft remember.)
- Field Notes, 2
- Snow Song
- Letter from Spring Green, WI
- Field Notes, 3
- Night Journey
- Homecoming
- Pretend It's a City
- Field Notes, 4
- IV: AN EXPLORER'S HAND BOOK
- Arrivals/Departures
- For thereby some have entertained angels
- An Explorer's Handbook
- The emotional lives of Soviet objects, 1
- The emotional lives of Soviet objects, 2
- The emotional lives of Soviet objects, 3
- The Early Medieval Balkans
- A great work
- Kate Marsden Leaves Moscow
- On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers
- Much to my regret
- Appendix to Official Papers and Letters
- Beyond Siberia
- The Stone Flower
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Copyright
