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    Kith
    Kith
    Kith
    Ebook73 pages26 minutes

    Kith

    By Jo Bell

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Love, sex, boats and friendship. And yet Jo Bell's second poetry collection, Kith, is about so much more, as these bold and generous poems interweave bigger questions of place, identity and community and what these mean to us, here and now.
    Delighting in the belting, beautiful turn-of-phrase, Jo Bell's poems are lyrical and joyous, but always precise and clear as birdsong. They take us the long way home, plot histories along the route of backwaters, and are occasionally diverted for a roll in the hay; hearts are broken and boats are dry-docked. There will be tears, but there will also be love, safe harbours, and the company of wise and faithful kith.
    Jo Bell - archaeologist, boat dweller and erstwhile director of National Poetry Day - is a poetry pundit and deviser of online poetry community 52. Winner in 2014 of the Charles Causley prize and Manchester Cathedral prize, and placed in the Bridport, Wigtown, and Ballymaloe international competitions, she has had a fortunate year. She is currently building new projects with the writer Tania Hershman and poet Michael Symmons Roberts. Kith is her second collection of poems.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNine Arches Press
    Release dateAug 26, 2015
    ISBN9781911027003
    Kith
    Author

    Jo Bell

    Jo Bell was born in Sheffield and grew up on the fringes of the Derbyshire Peak District, leaving school just after the Miners’ Strike. She became an industrial archaeologist, specialising in coal and lead mines. A winner of the Charles Causley Prize and the Manchester Cathedral Prize, she was the first Canal Laureate for the UK appointed by the Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust. She lives on a narrowboat on the English waterways. Kith (Nine Arches Press) is Jo Bell’s second collection of poems.

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    • 4/5
      Sorry to see this going back to the library. Love the canal boats and archeology. I have a cousin lives on a narrowboat so I can feel a connection. However I think that in the absence of this connection I would have found some other one as reading the book brings her voice close.

    Book preview

    Kith - Jo Bell

    KITH

    Kith

    Jo Bell

    ISBN: 9781911027003

    Copyright © Jo Bell, 2015

    Cover artwork ‘Autumn Night’ © Heather Duncan.

    www.heatherduncan.co.uk

    All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

    Jo Bell has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

    First published April 2015 by:

    Nine Arches Press

    PO Box 6269

    Rugby

    CV21 9NL

    United Kingdom

    www.ninearchespress.com

    Printed in Britain by:

    The Russell Press Ltd.

    Ebook conversion by leeds-ebooks.co.uk

    KITH

    Jo Bell

    LOGO.jpeg

    Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, ‘What is the use?’ For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal.

    – Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

    Contents

    Crates

    Taken

    Like love

    Lately

    Shame

    I have not asked for this

    Cuntstruck

    Talking to myself

    Enough deathbed talk:

    Fig roll

    Muse

    No Seafarer

    Given

    Springtime at the boatyard

    Breaker’s yard

    Tied up

    Tixall Wide

    Frozen in

    How to live on a narrow boat

    My country

    Kingfisher

    Oiks

    Still life

    Boat in dry dock

    Lifted

    A crossing

    Severn, from Purton

    The archaeologist of rivers

    Eve naming the birds

    Infallible

    Gloriana

    A nightingale for Gilbert White

    Mallaig

    From here on up all the paths are informal

    Excavation

    Small finds

    Silbury Hill

    Mute

    My Schiehallion

    Waiting in Starbucks for Max

    Raising the roof for Kirsty

    Birdsong at the Rec

    Beginnings

    First, cause no harm

    Fair play

    February 21st

    Shibboleth

    Your Helens and my Jonathans

    Mowing

    Worship

    Whales

    The End

    A diet rich in birdsong

    Rooks over Avebury

    Begin

    Society of Friends

    Kith

    I will lift up mine eyes to

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