Elizabeth Rimmer is a poet, blogger and editor, living in Glasgow. She has four collections with Red Squirrel Press, Wherever We Live Now, The Territory of Rain, Haggards, and The Well of the Moon. Her work has been translated into French, Arabic and Gaelic, and one of her poems, ‘Blanket Bog’, once appeared on the side of a bus.

www.elizabethrimmer.com

 

This collection charts both a move to a new home after a period of almost forty years, and the processes of recovery from the dislocation and loss of the pandemic. There are poems about bats, owls and ghosts, intergenerational traumas and misconceptions, herbs, the transmission of knowledge, and music. Through connections with landscape, history and folklore, it explores themes of alienation and projection, strangeness and reconciliation, creativity and healing.

 

‘Elizabeth Rimmer’s poetry is an act of careful, yet urgent, attention to the constantly burgeoning life all around us, exhorting us to “Look!” as “secret daffodils are stretching green fingers”. In poems which are as alive as the seeds, herbs, flowers, animals, and elemental forces that she depicts so beautifully, the observable world runs alongside older forms of knowledge, and alongside unseen presences as elusive as the bats that give the book its title. She is as equally attuned to a “southwest wind agitating the hawthorn trees” as to the “language before the word” and to “the hush where we might meet the song of the angels”.’

 

—Andrew Forster-Holland

 

‘Elizabeth Rimmer’s poems are rooted where human and non-human meet, among “ghosts of druids, discarded vodka bottles”. Amid meditations on wren, bats and boisterous fox, the music of Kurt Cobain and Martyn Bennett resonates. A hymn, countering contemporary authoritarian language and monoculture, contrasts with a tenth century herbalist text, translated by Rimmer herself. Alive with ghosts and memories, these poems hold layered, deeper meanings. They are invocations and prayers locating the mystical in “the wisdom of quiet places”, among hawthorn, cleavers, couchgrass, plantain and nettle, offering the possibility of deep healing, of hope.’

 

—Jay Whittaker

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