*****

Kitty Coles’ outstanding collection, Visiting Hours, was published by the High Window Press in January 2020. Copies are still available from amazon.co.uk

Kitty Coles’s poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and have been nominated for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her debut pamphlet, Seal Wife (2017), was joint winner of the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize. Visiting Hours was her first full collection. At the time of publication Kitty lived in Surrey and worked for a charity supporting disabled people.

If you follow this link to the literary magazine Confluence you can read an interview with Kitty in which she discusses her work with Sam McCabe.

*****

From reviews of Kitty Coles’s The Seal Wife

‘There are echoes of Freud, Kafka and Bettelheim in Kitty Coles’ remarkable debut collection, which won the Indigo Dreams Pamphlet Prize 2016. The imagery is frequently startling, the undercurrents frequently dark and unsettling. A memorable and impressive debut.’
– The Frogmore Papers

‘…by the second poem her changelings were creeping under my skin. A quiet horror permeates the collection…. The more I read of these legends and lore revisited the more I came by the impression that I could have just as easily been reading Carol Ann Duffy, because Kitty Coles too has that enviable talent of seeming to lull one with the predictable and then nudging one awake.’
– The Journal

*****

KItty Coles: Six Poems from Visiting Hours

I AM BRINGING YOU MY HEART IN A SMALL BOX

studded with pins, a hoodoo artefact,
hot from the burning hob, the rendered tallow.

Here are my fingernails, narrow moon-shavings,
and a slice of yellow hair, like a slice of sun.

This is my spit, willingly given to you,
for you to wrap my soul in a mesh of air.

I will speak my name at your grove’s unholy centre
and let you use it to bind me, hand over hand.

And the flesh, gross marble, inert on its midnight plinth,
cold and cumbrous, a broken column.

ENCROACHMENT

We barely noticed at first:
a fracture in the plaster, thin as a hair,
then other fractures leading off from it,
veining the walls like rivers,
a map of blemish, the stealthy scent
of loam, a sound of beetles there
behind the skirting, of breathing in and out
below the floor.

The fissures widened into small ravines.
The carpet bunched itself and
darkness flowered, in damp, irregular splotches,
under it. And then a vine
beckoned around the mantel,
stretching itself beyond the net of chinks
and undulating like a caterpillar.

It crept across the room, and more came after,
extending from the rafters, stalactites,
inching across the hallway, up the stairs.
They sprouted leaves, shaped sharp as arrow heads.
They put forth flowers, white,
spreading like ether, and mists of pollen
which filmed the windows gold
and laid their sticky dust on furnishings.

We took the secateurs and snipped away
until our thumbs were sore and fingers stiff.
We stayed up late, burning the bales of cuttings,
which caught reluctantly, sizzled like fat.
They grew again, pouring themselves, green water,
and bees appeared, as big as hummingbirds,
and twiggy crawling things
with shiny cases and butterflies

that roamed the house in packs
and settled on the bed in wingy blankets,
their quivering making the windows shake.
They shone like eyelids,
like ravenous yellow flames,
consuming, licking,
licking, swallowing.

EROSION

I thought that it was safe here; didn’t I?
Maybe; before the day I found a rabbit
bobbing – wide-eyed and stiff,

fingered by sea anemones, their wet mouths
gaping, covetous for kisses –
cradled in a rockpool on the shore.

We built homes here,
the gardens rank with allium,
the shrubs contorted, reaching to the earth.

Gulls troubled us; their appetites,
their muck, their screeches
at the windows begging entry.

The water lifted stone and threw it back,
milling it fine; the air was grained with it.
The water left us glass and dirtless shells

and once a funeral wreath,
bleeding its purples.
Now cliffs return to dust and houses

slant. Walls rubble up and fences
travel seawards. The neighbours pack
their bags and start their engines and I

look out across the green tide’s conquest
and hear it suck, withdraw
and suck again.

I HAVE NEVER DISSECTED A CREATURE

I have never peeled the seven veils of skin
away, sliced through flesh like a gourd or squash,
to reach the musculature, the organ-bags.

You, to gain wisdom, have opened –
or watched open – the human head,
observed its contents, probed its softnesses.

You have seen the heart unarmoured,
dense and tuberous, a grapey purple,
and memorised its functionality.

You know the circuits that make beings move,
the chemicals whose glitches make me sick.
You understand it all. You never found

a soul in anybody, which must prove
no soul exists – or else, that each soul moved
when you came after it and shrank from you.

THE WOLF AT THE DOOR

At the full of the moon,
I hear his long nails scratching
against the doorframe,
and his quiet whine,
its syllables
his rough approximation,
his lupine effort,
to pronounce my name.

You think his nails
must be the fingers of trees,
tapping and scraping
at our bricks and mortar.
You think his whine
must be the wind
in their branches
and the yellow beams
that slide between the shutters
must be moonlight,
not the light of his wet eyes.

He is stirring my skin
and setting my blood
on edge. His shadow
creeps on the wall
like Nosferatu.
My tongue lies furred
and still with his silences.

When I open the door,
stars blaze
behind my eyelids.
A rush of dry leaves
blows in, its decrepit odours.

He stands on hind legs,
like a man,
coat thick and bloody.
His jaws drip freely
with their offering.

What is that gift he holds,
where did he find it,
why must I take it in my gooseflesh hands?

EVERY DEAD THING

For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.
John Donne

These days, tears are always near the surface.
And love, too; I am sloshing with it,
overbrimming. Its sweetness turns
my cells to honeycomb.
I’m afraid of its richness, saturated, heavy,

so that, as we pass, on the road to Chichester,
one dead thing after another – a hedgehog
churned to a sludge of spines and offal,
limp, bloody bunnies,
a squirrel, flapping its tail like a sad standard –

I long to pour it out,
unleash it on these corpses,
not squandering negligently,
but restoring their breath, knitting their wounds to scars,
and mending them as you, unasked, did me.

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