This book will be released in October 2024.
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‘Shoot for the moon? Holborow has landed, roamed its face, dipped into the craters, and gathered an armful of stars while up there.’ – Wales Arts Review
How wearily you pull Kleenex from the packet,
stick figures springing backwards into hedgerows,
snowing pollen. How the world might not swallow you back.
The poems in Natalie Ann Holborow’s third collection, Little Universe, are an exploration of tumultuous human emotions and nature’s ever-present rhythms.
Lives bustle within a busy hospital’s walls, humming against the Gower landscape that stretches beyond its windows. The tiny worlds of a wide cast unfold as they deal with their own emergencies, losses, recoveries, hopes and histories.
Medical students stride the length of the corridor in rubber shoes, scars running the lengths of their lives. A janitor is crying in the Gents’, watching the flowers at the hospital entrance shrug themselves back into earth. The biblical Lilith offers knowledge from one woman to the other. And somewhere in the distance, a bunker dissolves into gold upon Pennard’s shoulder, dusk folding to sleep on Rhossili.
The characters in this book are all bound by the undying pulse of existence – yet their stories serve as a reminder that despite these stark contrasts, life persists.
Natalie Ann Holborow is a winner of the Terry Hetherington Award and the Robin Reeves Prize and has been shortlisted and commended for the Bridport Prize, the National Poetry Competition, the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word Award among others. Her writing residencies with the British Council, Literature Wales and Kultivera have seen her writing and performing poetry in Wales, Ireland, Sweden and India. She is the author of the poetry collections And Suddenly You Find Yourself, Small – both listed as Best Poetry Collections of the Year by Wales Arts Review – and, with Mari Ellis Dunning, the collaborative poetry pamphlet The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass. Little Universe is her third full collection. Natalie lives in Swansea, is a proud patron of local charity The Leon Heart Fund, and runs marathons to raise funds. (Photo credit Ceri Llewellyn, 2024)
natalieholborow.com