Natasha Cuddington
Each of Us (Our Chronic Alphabets)
ISBN: 9781851322039
This is an astonishing collection, original, complex and weighty. Natasha Cuddington’s language follows the movements of the mind, the emphases, repetitions and lacunae of actual colloquial speech, so that the reader gathers meaning, as if overhearing voices. The integrity of the work, its precision in layout, are matched by its fertility and life. We are drawn in as readers to discover how we can be touched by language divorced from predictable shapes and structures, how words can surround us stereophonically and immerse us in meaning, how metaphors can accumulate over a series. The poems confront us with alien depths, and then again with glimpses of the natural, the familiar world, displayed in language that is rich and suggestive.
– Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
This is exhilarating work! As if an eruption is happening in her language and her job is to put it all back together in new and magnificent order. I imagine her as the great grand niece of e.e.cummings, in a lineage that goes back to Emily Dickinson and beyond into the distant past of mark making. Deep learning and curiosity is the hallmark of this poetry and it rewards the reader — the more you will have looked, the more you will have found.
– Paula Meehan
Natasha Cuddington’s work takes the reader on a journey to the sources of the self. With striking imagery and with an arresting precision of language, these poems demand our close attention, repaying that by providing experiential moments that will stay in the mind for an age. Surprising, inventive and never predictable, this work is humane and engaged with the multiple pressures on the integrity of how we live now. In matching formal experiment to the zeitgeist of our moment, Natasha Cuddington announces herself as a poet who speaks directly to our times.
– Siobhán Campbell
Parhelia, Grace, Print. Across the arc of these parts image, motif and language, uniquely forged, combine to illuminate the movement of the whole by the measure from its wing.
– Eilish Martin