‘CALCUTT HAS TALENT TO BURN’
Clare Pollard
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. Calcutt’s poems have a descriptive power which illuminates a story that so many women will recognize and understand.’
Zoë Brigley
A highly accomplished set of poems which consider the ways grief, guilt and loss attach themselves to both the family and the natural world for restoration…At times devastating, at other times buoyant, but always totally human.”
Anthony Anaxagorou on ‘Somehow’
‘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’.
Clare Pollard
Feeling All the Kills
At the heart of this collection is a personal desire to navigate a way back to a sensual, whole-feeling self…
Feeling All the Kills is a dazzling new collection described as ‘radical, revolutionary, and fearless in depicting women as sexual and maternal” (Zoë Brigley) Through the poems’ breath-taking and vital vocabulary Calcutt brings the physical, emotional, and sexual nuances of life to the foreground, with strength, subtlety and beauty, and courageously harnesses a sense of ownership over such a lasting trauma.
At the heart of this collection is a personal desire to navigate a way back to a sensual, whole-feeling self, to shamelessly ‘feel all’ — with authenticity and power.
ORDER YOUR COPY (Waterstones , Amazon, WOB, all good bookstores.)
Somehow
Helen’s celebrated pamphlet delves into the profound grief and complex emotions following the suicide of her brother in 2017
‘… the phone rang / and when I answered it / you’d killed / yourself, and that was the start / of you being dead.’
This is the starting point of an astonishing new pamphlet of poems by Helen Calcutt. At times harrowing; at others hopeful – always deeply felt and beautifully realised. These poems display the poise and precision of a poet already at the height of her powers, writing the un-writable, weaving the terrible into something relatable and filled with the light of understanding.
How do we survive the tumultuous presence of grief? How does the trauma of losing a loved one to suicide affect, our identity, our creativity, and our ability to love? How – in a world shattered by incomparable change and severe loss – do we build a life from the wreckage? Because we do.
Somehow, we do.
Anthology Eighty-Four
Eighty-Four is a poetry anthology edited & curated by Helen Calcutt, created in aid of suicide prevention charity C.A.L.M.
Poems were donated by leading voices including Andrew McMillan, Anthony Anaxagorou, Katrina Naomi, Ian Patterson, Joelle Taylor, Salena Godden, and Romalyn Ante while a submissions window yielded many excellent poems from both known and emerging writers across the globe. Here is a diverse collection of voices, delicately speaking the intense difficulties of the human predicament, and courageously engaging with the profound impact that male suicide is having on all of us. Eighty Four was a Poetry Wales Book of the Year and a Sabotage Award shortlist.
For further reading & support please go to C.A.L.M.
Or your copy here. All proceeds ate donated.
