“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
Publications
Helen’s writing has been published globally. Her collections include the celebrated ‘Somehow’ (Verve Poetry Press) a PBS Winter Pamphlet and Poetry School Book of the Year, and her full-length Pavlion Poetry title ‘Feeling All the Kills.’ Her writing appears in the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, the PN Review, The London Magazine, The Brooklyn Review, Envoi, Wild Court, and many others.
Mentorship / Workshops
Helen performs and shares her poetry internationally, recognised widely for an approach that explores the sensory, physical, and emotional textures of language.
With a particular emphasis on writing from embodied memory, she facilitates, and delivers lectures and keynotes on poetry and the body, authentic practice, and navigating a literary career. She has shared her practice with The Poetry School, Arvon, LABRC, Writing West Midlands, HAY (Young Women’s Writing Programme), Poetry by Heart, Poetry International the National Trust, and across U.K. wide & international festivals.
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, courageously harnessing a sense of ownership over lasting trauma.
ORDER YOUR COPY (Waterstones , Amazon, WOB, all good bookstores.)
Somehow
Helen’s widely celebrated pamphlet delves into the profound grief and complex emotions following the suicide of her brother in 2017.
“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
Anthology Eighty-Four
Eighty-Four is a poetry anthology created & edited by Helen Calcutt 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 named Poetry Wales Book of the Year and shortlisted for a Saboteur Award.
For further reading & support please go to C.A.L.M.
Or your copy here. All proceeds are donated.
LISTEN & WATCH
Listen to Gregory Kearns in conversation with Helen on The Poems We Made Along the Way, exploring how language becomes movement and how her approach to working with sensitive material in poetry has evolved.
