Charlotte Runcie
Charlotte Runcie's first pamphlet of poems sees her set out on journeys,
internal and external, real and imagined. From the first confident 'Yes',
she heads off, up a cliff, into the far past, and into both sea and starscapes,
to 'wash the earth in outer space'. The sonnets here show her to be a skilled formalist, and she also has a knack for extended images, tints of the strange.
Charlotte Runcie shares her time between Edinburgh and London, and reads English at Cambridge University. She is co-editor of Pomegranate Poetry ezine and has had poetry published in several magazines. She was a Foyle Young
Poet of the Year in 2006 and won first prize in the Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes in 2007.
Poised, quick-witted, economical poems that often start out
from the corporeal, its pleasures and travails, and all its sloughed
second skins, swaddling, masks and grave goods – I’ve been mightily impressed by Charlotte Runcie’s debut, and the lovely promise of even greater things to come which, like in all the best debuts, is insisted on every page here.
Paul Farley
seventeen horse skeletons
number 15 in the pilot series
£4 inc p&p
ISBN 978 1 904551 67 6
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Fur
In the lounge she wore a stole
of long albino eyelashes
pulled loose and bound,
threaded in a winter knit.
Her faint neck rose
from porcupine icicles, a
stiff vogue brush of fishbones.
She unwound it in the powder room,
uncovering bare alcoves
around her collarbone, exposing
something of the tundra,
her muscles wrapped in wide white plains.
At the door I clothe her again
in other creatures’ skin.
Shivering, I press myself
to chalky bones and gauze,
the fabric of her cheek,
inhaling fox fur.
Her breathing in my hair is ghosts.