How to Carry Fire ****
By Christina Thatcher
£9.00
Parthian Books
From Cardigan’s Parthian Books comes How To Carry Fire by Christina Thatcher, a poet based in Cardiff and lecturer at Cardiff Met. This is an anthology of poems about the author’s move from America to Wales and everything in between. The motif of fire burns through the pages: of its ability to destroy, to provide warmth, its potential to enable growth once the flames have been put out, and of how to carry it through life, allowing it to fuel you without letting it consume you.
Starting with the burning down of Thatcher’s childhood home and finishing with an understanding of how to build a home within oneself, as well as within someone else’s heart, How To Carry Fire is hot to the touch in its heartbreak but warming in its hopefulness. Her poetry’s language is simple in terms of sentence structure, but deeply textured beneath the surface – like fire in containment, to continue the anthology’s metaphor. These poems are what you imagine would remain after setting fire to a lifetime of anxieties, thought, pain and experience: the frills burnt away from a smouldering core.
Through the haze of ashes, loss, opioids and trauma emerge poems which are pulsing with life – or perhaps clinging to it. Either way, they are strong, resilient and urgent. They explore the soft space between forgiveness and acceptance – of self and of others – and the intricacies of love, sex and togetherness.
Parthian Books is sending them directly to your doorstep during lockdown via their website.
Words MEGAN THOMAS
How to Carry Fire