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Natalie Ann Holborow

Little Universe

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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

'Little Universe presents an intense voyage through a recognisable Welsh landscape of family, hospital wards, homes, beaches, love, and new life. The poems encompass mythology, the joys of the everyday and the personal inevitability of illness and grief. This is a poetry acutely aware of the specificity of vocabulary and of the unconstrained possibilities of inventive language. I love, love, love this collection and every part of its heartfelt oomph!’ – Jeremy Dixon

‘Natalie Ann Holborow’s new collection probes vulnerability with a fresh eye. The investigations of its visceral poems discover the mind and body’s ‘clandestine angles’ that emerge only at their limits, when they are ‘primed for the blow’. This is intimate, poignant writing. Stunning imagery bursts from these pages as the speaker’s selves open to their surroundings, the reader joining a chorus of "startled applause".’  – John McCullough

‘Poems of true wonder, mystery composed with precision. Natalie Ann Holborow is a custodian of beauty in the ordinary and the fragility of experience. The lyric moments of her Little Universe made me lift my eyes from the page and consult the stars.’ – Oliver James Lomax

 

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 along the corridors 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 and 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