Claire Crowther  has published two pamphlets and two full collections of poetry - Stretch of Closures (2007) shortlisted for the Aldeburgh prize for the best first collection, and The Clockwork Gift (2009). Crowther has spent many years working as editor and journalist in the weight management industry; this ingenious collection reflects her wide experience and understanding of the subject of body fat, relevant to many readers but rarely written about. The fascination with form evident in earlier collections continues here in her use of the aptly named fatras, a medieval verse form associated with nonsense poems.

 

Claire Crowther's Incense in its formal incantatory sequence of poems examines the nature of our attitude to body fat — not merely the industrialisation and pathology of being fat — but almost the spiritual and historical nature of fat itself. This extraordinary meditation uses the fatrasie form, made popular as nonsense poems in medieval France, but Crowther's treatment is far from nonsense, these poems shift from indictment to sympathy, exposing us to our bizarre modern horror of size and weight in poems that are exquisite, memorable and deeply poignant.  Chris Hamilton-Emery

 

While her poems can be crystal-clear, more often they are riddling, veering, mysterious; deadly serious or quietly funny. Richard Price

Crowther writes with visual brilliance... Vidyan Ravinthiran

Crowther's poetry is thematic only in the sense that C major is the theme of a Bach prelude or fugue. David Wheatley

£5.50 (inc p+p)                                       ISBN: 978-1-906480-27-1

 

 

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