We all have our favourite demons. A desperate Romeo circles thebushes below Juliet's balcony, hoping for a glimpse of her barebody. Adamant of his own sanity, Hamlet chatters away to his oldest friend, the skullgrinning in his palm. Andromache screams for her only child,'spiralling like sycamore' from the walls of Troy.
Exploring the depths of tumultuous human emotions, the poems delve into the intricate relationship between these feelings and the rhythms of nature. Holborow's work captures the essence of life's complexities, weaving together personal experiences with the natural world to create a profound and resonant collection.
The poems in this collection explore what it means to be human: where the mythological meets the modern, where fairytales, family and revenge collide, and a haunting mix of love, loss, desire, fear and revenge that is unafraid to unsettle the reader. This remarkable collection of work finds people at their most vulnerable: Achilles counting to ten outside a psychiatrist's door, a man finding himself in the shrinking bedroom of his mid-life, a lost sister chain-smoking into the breeze or a TB victim hacking her rags of lung softly into a pillow. each one unflichingly reveals the truth about what it means to be real. The people in this book may surprise you, their lives may be startlingly varied, but Natalie ann Holborow's poems are an engaging, unnerving and honest exploration of the human experience in all its beauty and rawness.