Blackwell UK
Sunday at the Skin Launderette
PBS Recommendation
ISBN: 9781854114617
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Poetry Wales Press
Quietly persuasive and formally adept, the poems in Kathryn Simmonds' first collection engage with both the quotidian and the transcendental. Often in urban or suburban settings, her protagonists struggle with mundane tasks such as cooking or commuting or office work … More
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Winner of the United Kingdom's prestigious Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection
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This is the first full collection of poems by Kathryn Simmonds. Her's is a fresh, lovely, accessible voice. She confronts the dilemmas of a young woman living in the city with considerable humour and a poignant grace. An element of surrealism often invades her poems, taking from the quotidian to the suddenly unsettling and strange, as when a secretary flies up into space, or a laundrette becomes a place for stripping off skin. She also approaches her themes and characters with an ironic tenderness, as in 'Snug' where world leaders mentioned in the news on a bedside radio are invited to share a nap with the speaker, thereby encouraging world peace. Particularly notable is the way she transforms the mundane, the "lull of 3 o'clock", so that days spent in dull jobs, on the bus, at the photocopier, suddenly become moments of expectation and beauty. In her poems, there is sense that anything might happen - and probably will.
