Some years ago Harriet Tarlo found a form and started writing Cut Flowers. All kinds of materials found a place to go that might allow, to some extent, for the contradictory nature of life and language, their depth and shallowness. This is the second volume of Cut Flowers to be published by Guillemot Press. It holds four sections engaged with ‘Forestry, Folk,’ ‘Passed, Passing,’ ‘Coastal Kestrel’ and ‘Gallery, Ground’ reflecting engagement with place, environment, art, music and death. Ultimately however, Cut Flowers 2 is as much about this elusive, alluring little form as anything.

Like Tarlo’s earlier collection, Field, the only tether present on the page is the turn of the seasons. Beyond this familiar rhythm (or perhaps increasingly unfamiliar rhythm) lies an inventive and playful form which seems to simultaneously provide structure whilst remaining rangy and generous with the potential of the page and the images and ideas that leap from it, depending of course, on how you choose to read it. These tiny poems inhabit both the deeply intimate and the universal – the refutation of the linear here is wonderfully expansive and gives way to multiple meanderings, meanings and readings.

Fiona Cameron

Each poem has an initial line or question followed by eight lines which are arranged into two columns, with the left-hand column much narrower than the right hand one. I was worried that the structure would be too tight and confining, in contrast to the expanding open form of much of Tarlo’s work. Yet the constraining columns seem to take us deeper into landscape and life, suggesting new directions, in spite of, or because of, the complexity of creating and understanding the different versions of the poem - how it is cut up.

Frances Presley

Harriet Tarlo’s books include Gathering Grounds (Shearsman, 2019) and Field (Shearsman, 2016) as well as four artists books with Judith Tucker (Wild Pansy Press). Harriet was the editor of the influential anthology of radical landscape poetry The Ground Aslant (Shearsman, 2011).

The cover of Cut Flowers 2 is by Judith Tucker.

64pp / 175mm x 120mm / ISBN 978-1-913749-47-7
September 2024