Red Gloves

By Rebecca Watts

In this follow-up to her acclaimed debut The Met Office Advises Caution, Rebecca Watts observes and tests the limits of humanity's engagement with the non-human. By turns lyrical and narrative, the poems examine familiar subjects environmental crisis, hawks, hospitals, the sea, barbecues, flowers, Emily Dickinson only to find their subjects staring, sometimes fighting, back. Nature and nurture, equally red in tooth and claw, power a book-long sparring match between the overthinking poet and the ever-thoughtless universe, between the craft's isolation and the world's irrepressible variety. Gloves on and gloves off, the poet's hands destroy and build, gather and scatter, caress and strike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781784109561

Rebecca Watts

Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge. In 2014 she was one of the Poetry Trust’s Aldeburgh Eight, and in 2015 a selection of her work was included in Carcanet’s New Poetries VI anthology. The Met Office Advises Caution is her first collection.

Book preview

iii

REBECCA WATTS

Red Gloves

CONTENTS

Title Page

Economics

Definitions

Red Gloves

Amnesiac

Music in Four Parts

Having bled on a library book

Salvation

Sweet peas for the wedding

Worship Not the Object but the Thing it Represents

Surveillance

A History of Minor Conflict

When I was a girl

Building

Encore

Notations for a Hospital

Corridor

Admission

When all this is over

Grasmere Early

At the Sanctuary

Gloucester, Massachusetts

Matrimony

Interns

Glamour

The Studio

Forces Falls

Oh, Susie, it is dangerous

In the Poet’s Bedroom

Sunflowers

Barbecues

The Desire Path

Whereas

Finds

Be Careful on the Cobb

Gratitude

The Drawing Room

Ancestry.com

My Blue Period

Small Acts

Of an Honest Churchgoing Man Questioned by a Minister on His Deathbed

There have been Movements

At Bay

That Sort of Note

Peg,

Bluebottle

Should Anyone Be Left Alive

Daffodils push through in the mild first days of January,

Disappearing Act

The Entangled Bank

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Rebecca Watts, from Carcanet

Copyright

vii

RED GLOVES

viii

5

ECONOMICS

Everything comes down to numbers in the end.

This morning a blackbird woke me up; five swans in formation

trailed their silver chevrons upriver, unbothered by

the heron’s slow torpedo; three horses in maroon jackets stood

mystified by their own breath. A greenfinch and thirty-nine

cows patterned the field; twin black labs trotted through

the long grass, jingling, and unearthed a compact of magpies.

I didn’t count the dandelion clocks, there were so many.

You ask me would I move to the city to be with you.

I’m telling you what I saw; you can