| Links |
| Arc Publications:
arcpublications.co.uk |
| Salt Publishing:
saltpublishing.com |
| Buy the books:
amazon.co.uk |
| Sample workshops:
poetrysociety.org.uk applesandsnakes.org |
| The Poetry Zone:
poetryzone.co.uk |
| Arvon Foundation:
arvonfoundation.org |
| Reviews/quotes |
| ‘a true original … she has a genuine gift,’
Jane Yeh, Poetry Review |
| ‘a wonderful collection,’
Jon Snow |
| ‘a voice refusing to be pinned down,’
Moniza Alvi |
| ‘a great sense of humour, an ear for what life sounds like,’
Helen Dunmore |
| ‘weird, interesting and humorous poems that will bear repeated visits,’
Roger Stevens, Poetry Zone website |
| ‘a McGough-like flair for idiomatic surrealism,’
Michael Thorn, TES |
| ‘I very much enjoyed reading your collection of children’s poetry,’
Estelle Morris |
| Home | Poetry | Children's Poetry | Short Stories | Radio | Dates |
PoetryChrissie's second adult poetry collection Optometrist has been accepted by Salt for publication March 2009. | |||
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Comments from the back cover of Armature‘her poems are well-sculpted, fine-boned, painterly and precise. Lively, accessible, and gently surprising, hers is a voice refusing to be pinned down. There is much to enjoy in this fresh and unusually natural first collection,’ Moniza Alvi, New Generation poet.‘Chrissie Gittins’s poems are elegant, sensual and deep. They are a joy to read first time round – and to revisit,’ Kate Kellaway, poetry editor, The Observer. Chrissie had read her poetry at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, the Royal Festival Hall Voice Box, Keats House Hampstead, Newcastle and Kingston Universities, Manchester Central Library, the Blue Room Newcastle, the An Tuireann Arts Centre on Skye, and The Bowery Poetry Club New York. | ||
ReviewsOne of the more striking debuts of 2003 was Armature, by Chrissie Gittins, a longish collection (incorporating two previously published pamphlets) with enough surprises to keep me reading to the end. The contents range from the autobiographical - facing a loved one's Alzheimer's (“Your hand, curled like a sepal, / waves from side to side through the blank window”), or travelling through Southeast Asia - to bizarre excursions into other characters' voices. An archangel: “I am an elderly lady with a stammer, / . . . I live in a chewing gum ball, / I live in a jacket”. Gittins's deadpan tone and skewed perspective mark her out as a true original. In “Gutted” a child confides, “Telly's rubbish in the day. The adverts are alright. I want to spear a dummy with a bayonet”. Elsewhere, an ambiguous protagonist (nanny? jealous sibling?) admits, with unsettling candour, to abusing a baby: “My job is to make our baby smile. / . . . If Mummy is gone a long time / I get her skin between my fingernails and squeeze. / . . . I'm definitely more interesting than her toys”. And in “The Withdrawing Room”, Gittins plays the part of a disenchanted mother conducting a tour of her National Trust-listed home. Between judgments on its architectural features (“Limed staircase, carved here with boring hearts and diamonds”) the owner lets slip gnomic facts about her life (“I went to university the same year as my daughter. She was a bit put out when I got a first, / we phoned each other every day”). Gittins characterises her speakers through disjunctive, seemingly random pronouncements that manage to betray their vulnerability, longing and frustration - she has a genuine gift. Jane Yeh, Poetry Review, Spring 2004.‘it is the poetry of collisions, of the meeting of madness and sanity, of different experiences of an identical moment, of what is exact and what is elusive. These poems are moving; they achieve a degree of pathos that gives them authority. There are poems about Italy and Spain and Scotland, about magnolias and mountains and Elizabeth Taylor's nose, about the Yalding floods of 2000 and the thoughts of a convict. There are all sorts of voices, too: Psyche, an eldest child, Santa Teresa's hand, a medievalist, an iguana. There's also flexibility of approach: a jolly surreal episode with origami in a railway train; a sharply entertaining Table of Kindred and Affinity. This is not a light-hearted collection, except incidentally; it's pretty serious poetry, by a serious professional. There's variety and interest here, and an artistic sensibility alert to the contradictions and possibilities of experience.’ Dr Rosie Bailey, Envoi 138, Summer 2004. ‘The juxtapositions and tonal shifts that characterize the poems in Armature find a balance and profundity here that are exceptionally effective. Yet while it is a book with many shades of light and dark throughout, its strength resides in the way each can be seen to inhabit the other.’ Dr John Ballam www.suite101.com ‘Chrissie Gittins’s collection, Armature, holds a series of delicate dementia poems. The first opens in heart-breaking mid-sentence with a non-sequitural ‘but a lemon hangs from the branch in the conservatory.’ (‘Today Is Friday, The Season Is Winter, The Weather Is Cold’). In other sections of Armature, a book of parts, she writes extremely well from the perspective of a child, and excels at the psychologically revealing. Her evocation of the world of a Karenni refugee in Thailand and Britain is delicate and moving, particularly in the more personal poems. Judy Kendall, PN Review 158, Summer 2004. ‘She writes with tenderness and care, an ear for speech and a strong sense of empathy. My favourite poems in this collection were a series about an elderly relative. In these poems she documents both the physical changes and the less perceptible changes, as in ‘Pilot’. All the poems are full of images, colour and vitality. They leap from voice to voice and are at times surprising, with unexpected juxtapositions, or occasional, bizarre images. Her strength throughout the book is that at the heart of each poem is a person, a relationship, some insight into the human condition. The variety of her choice of subject and her lively style makes this an enjoyable read. Sally Baker, The North 34, July 2004. This volume consists of forty-two poems framed by two collections which have previously been published in pamphlet form, ‘Pilot’ and ‘A Path of Rice’. ‘Pilot’ deals movingly with the physical and mental decline of an elderly parent. Matter-of-fact statements – ‘there are things I must realise you can no longer do’ – combine with some fine imagery and lines which reflect upon the poet’s feelings when faced with this situation. The detail is well observed, and the writing balances the realities of the situation with its implications delicately. The theme is picked up and extended in ‘A Path of Rice’ when, in Thailand, the poet finds ‘I am my father/our freckles fuse’, and her experiences are bound up with his war experiences, the whole marked by subtle shifts between poetic and demotic language which is stimulating and effective. In between the pamphlets, the poems are marked by a variety of location and mood. The description of place, particularly landscapes, is vivid and sensual, while the warmth of some of the imagery in some poems in punctuated by sudden and surprising violence or explicitly sexual imagery in others. The collection is varied in mood and emphasis, and rewards close reading. Frank Startup, The School Librarian, Autumn 2004. Chrissie Gittins writes vividly about the everyday as well as less familiar lives and places – notably Thailand, where she has travelled extensively. ‘There is no striving for effect, but much to enjoy and admire in this fresh and unusually natural first collection.’ (Moniza Alvi) PBS BULLETIN, Number 198, Autumn 2003 Armature is the debut collection of Chrissie Gittins. The poems are located in the North of England and the Orient, their habitat extends to old people’s homes, The British Museum and a refugee camp. The thing that takes us between these worlds is Gittins’s relationship with her father, a recording of their relationship in his final months, her memories of him and her imaginings of his life. Her reconstructions of his wartime experiences are startling, ambitious in every way a poem should be. I like these poems because they tackle that big no-no, sentimentality. For me, poems are all about intellect meeting emotion and it seems to me that poets who don’t risk writing about love or anything that involves an intensity of feeling are only going to produce bland and banal writing. Lucky for us, Gittins doesn’t flinch. Gittins’s ear for dialogue is good, which enhances the characters in her work. There is a northerness to the poems, they are honest, unpretentious, no garnish. I’m impressed with the simplicity of the poems, and the trust Gittins has in herself. One of the biggest dilemmas is, how do you write poems that are as intelligent as you want them to be without losing a lot of readers by being too clever? The answer is, partly, by trying to say something complicated in very simple terms. It is to Gittins’s credit that she is very successful at this. The poems say what they mean, I mean they are exact, precise, they don’t pussyfoot around or best around the bush. They remain focussed and succinct. I find this extremely refreshing because it is so surprisingly rare. I like the way the family is the cornerstone of the book, there are poems about her father, her mother. There are carefully balanced poems about the rearing of her own children, (or the rearing of the narrator’s children). It’s good to read poetry about the family unit, about those small acts of kindness that we perform daily because we love, and that you wouldn’t believe existed if you believed soap opera world. I very much look forward to forthcoming collections by Chrissie Gittins. It’s her unflinching and unapologetic tackling of emotional concerns that, in my book, makes Armature a success. PETER KNAGGS, The Slab 2, 2005 ARMATURE by Chrissie Gittins (isbn 190007270X) is available from all good bookshops, www.arcpublications.co.uk, www.amazon.co.uk and from Central Books. | |||
ArmatureFor the feet, I push against the scrim the factthat we waited for each other in different bookshops. With a knife I smooth the calves with the thought of my Arran cardigan, newly washed, folded over your battered brown briefcase giving us the number 146 from the cloakroom. At the knee is the confusion of the word lift with escalator. The thighs I thumb with my fingers, rub in the crazed brown paint behind the furthest of Picasso’s Dancers with the blue impasto you noticed on the window. It was then I wanted to slip my hand inside the warmth of yours. The hips have got to be that wailing installation reminding you of your first marriage – a tortured face trapped beneath a sofa. The torso will be the viewing platform – the sun hitting the gold pinnacle of St Paul’s, the out of use Millennium Bridge you tried to use, the wooden bollard bobbing in the water, a quadrant of rainbow in a grey spotlit sky. It was here I rediscovered your tallness, my head inclined towards your shoulder. The neck is a reference to a previous conversation. The head will be the café. ‘You have the view,’ ‘No, you have the view, ‘Please, you have the view,’ two vases of broad banana leaves, a serviette laid over your knees for drinking tea, the fineness of your opaline skin, your exquisite finger ends, the landscape of your pillow mouth my fingers mean to trace. | |||
Thoughts of a Man in Maidstone JailI missed my daughter playing Juliet.She showed me her new blazer the day I left, there was Latin on the pocket. I missed hickeys hiding under her poloneck, the steamed up windows of a car outside, l ying in bed, waiting for our front door to slam. My son draws row on row of railings sprouting leaves. He asked if murder is in his genes, ‘Not unless you let it be,’ said his gentle mother. She folds sheets for another man, no mystery with him, no sleight of hand. A jug of milk stands on the kitchen table. I won’t have them visit me, they’ll not bear the brunt of my mistake, it’s my four more years to do on twelve. When I walk I may go back to Rawtenstall, or on to Rochdale, I don’t know. Each way there’ll be a rotten debt to pay.
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