Flamingo

Kathryn BevissFlamingointroduces us toa troupe of wild, unique, and captivating poems.Here, Bevistreats a range of subjects including work, survival, love, and mortality.Flamingobrings us into encounter with life and our own embodiment: our births and deaths, our struggles and joys, doing so with humour, dynamism, and spirit. Formally inventive, using forms from the ghazal to thegram of &s,all the poems take startling and original angles on their subject matter. There is humour and biting wit undercutting the sexual politics in Wonder Woman Questions Her Status as a 70s Symbol of Female Empowerment. There are surprising metaphors and surreal narratives that uncover difficult truths and painful experiences, as in Teddy in which a teddy bear stands in for an abusive partner.There are moving poems, too, about romantic love and family. Bevis is never afraid to explore complicated feelings for loved ones: for example in Knitting Nan-Nan, in which the poems speaker knits her grandmother back to life. Often, animals are companions on the journeys that these poems make. Starlings speak in a collective flock to remind us that individualism is not the rule for all creatures. A squid trapped in a fridge echoes the collective lockdown of 2020, and the grieving rituals of animals illuminate a human separation. Cancer is posed as a ring-tailed lemur, capering through the sufferers body, and the titular Flamingo imagines death as a flamboyant transformation where the speaker shapeshifts into the afterlife by becoming a flamingo herself. Altogether,Flamingois worth reading for its remarkable originality. Every poem in this book is a discovery and a joy.