This first full-length collection by Cardiff-based poet Emily Cotterill follows on from her debut poetry pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants published by Smith / Doorstop in 2019 which was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as part of the Laureate’s Choice series. Both deliver with a large dose of originality and wit keen observations on, among other things, celebrity culture, identity, place and small-town living.

Cotterill adopts what I term as the scatter-gun approach to writing. She shoots from the hip with verbal dexterity hitting at random a number of different targets which makes for lines that are full of surprises. This is how it appears on a first reading but repeated readings often indicate the presence of some kind of plan because everything in the end hangs together. The same goes for the very varied subject matter: a vast range that, nevertheless, holds itself together in a seamless fashion.  

Cotterill’s poems are peopled with singer-songwriters, musicians and actresses: Viv Albertine, guitarist for the punk band The Stilts, Patti Smith, influential member of the New York-based punk rock movement, and Debbie Harry, best known as lead vocalist of the band Blondie all make their appearance in the opening poem ‘The Greatest Punk Album in the World Ever (Disc Two).’ There are more references to the punk era in ‘Punks Consider the Dylan Thomas Theatre’ where Cotterill has a moment of sober reflection on the theme of mortality:

 

     I drive back remembering Vivienne Westwood is recently dead.

     It’s a wound I don’t know how to mention. The world gives us

     so few old women. It doesn’t like their thin skin. 

 

In other poems, references are made to celebrities such as James Dean Bradfield, the lead vocalist and guitarist for the Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers; the American singer-songwriter and actress Christina Aguilera; the American actress Halle Berry; the Canadian singer and songwriter Avril Lavigne; British actress Tilda Swinton and Welsh actor Michael Sheen. All these names are carefully dropped into Cotterill’s compositions, helping to ground them in place and time.

Other subjects revolve around street games such as curby and knuckles; graffiti and litter-picking. Cotterill employs the term “yarn-bombing” to denote a type of street art that makes use of colourful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than spray paint or chalk and the word “plogging”, a term invented by Erik Ahlström which refers to the act of picking up trash while jogging. Interestingly, it is derived from the Swedish term plocka upp which means ‘to pick up’, and jogging.

One of the many strengths of this volume is Cotterill’s penchant for coming up with inventive lines that catch us off guard and often reveal a hidden truth. In ‘The Bar in this Poem has Closed’ smashing a bottle becomes “a weapon against sadness”. In ‘Love Song to a Poster Boy’ she writes: “Even now I have peeled the last Blu-tac from the back / of you, my teenage heart remembers how you were / the perfect hook for grappling with.” ‘Slag’ opens with some striking imagery:

 

     I have loved coal,

     like a teenage girl loves

     an older guitarist with a rough

     black smudge of eyeliner.

     I have built my life on it,

     screamed down decades for it

     ‘coal not dole’ – bared my soul

     for it, but old women gossip

     about the pit. I know the world

     has had enough of it.

 

In ‘Slag’ and ‘John King (Disambiguation)’ Cotterill addresses the subject of coal mining, a topic which is never far from the heart of Wales. In the 1860s John King invented the mine cage safety detaching hook which is still manufactured and fitted to winding ropes in deep mines all over the world. His legacy is ‘All those bodies that didn’t fall, bones back at the surface.’  In another poem, ‘East Midlands Designer Outlet, Summer Term 2010’ Cotterill writes in remembrance of a teenager who was one of seven men killed in the South Normanton colliery explosion on 15th February 1937. The timeline in the poem oscillates between the shops, built over the site of the colliery, and the sadness that lies in the ground beneath and how this tragedy, had it not been for the installation of a plaque commemorating the men who died, would have slipped from the public conscience.

Even when writing about ordinary things, Cotterill has the capacity to turn them into something that is both thoughtful and universal. In ‘GRWM For a Looming Personal Crisis’ she sets the scene in the first eight lines with competent panache:

 

     This Saturday I am fixing my whole life

     by watching a woman’s trip food shopping

     uploaded to You Tube. I am absorbing order

     from her nutrients, I know she will soak

     those pulses, has firm plans for brown rice.

     If I can do this too, I will achieve her level

     of beautiful and I have come to realise

     what will fix my life is being beautiful.

 

(GRWM is an acronym used by Youtubers which stands for ‘Get Ready With Me’).

Whether she is writing about Kristen Stewart in ‘Charlie’s Angels’, a visit to the Dartington Crystal Factory in Torrington, a DJ spinning ‘The Grease Megamix’ or women taking a fish pedicure, Cotterill’s original style is contemporary, immediate  and engaging.

 

Emily Cotterill, Significant Wow, Seren, £10.99