Rose is reading at Tell Tales, Falmouth Townhouse at 7pm on Feb 23 2010 and at
Hoot at The Dolphin pub in Bovey Tracey at 8pm on Feb 27 2010
and here’s a lovely review:
Rose Cook Everyday Festival — Happenstance £4 ISBN 978-1-905939-36-7
Rose Cook’s pamphlet, Everyday Festival, is a collection for those who delight in the unexpected. The poem which inspires the title, ‘Everyday Festival notice’ is a list urging the reader to realise that every moment, every happening, however mundane, is something to be celebrated. And she does, in poems that at first glance are family observations, but which have surreal turns in the middle or at the end. Life has to be looked at from odd angles to for its secrets to be observed.
There are recurring images in Cook’s poems, elephants and punk hair, and memories, always memories with the elusive quality of dreams. It is hard to choose an example, as every poem has its shimmering surprise; ‘Naming’, for instance: ‘Children struggle, misnamed/ carrying leaden coats for years.// Who has not sung in their bed at night,/ found their true name, hugged its secret, / watched it flit away in the morning.’
In ‘My mother’s hand mirror’ ‘The mirror also showed future elephants,/ the field of dreams we all go trumpeting to,/ Alaska, over and over again, / a trapped princess in her tower –/ what happened to her?// It showed lines of washing,/ piles of gold and, at a certain angle, / babies flew the walls.’
This is a collection of sly epiphanies, to be delighted in, over and over.
Lyn Moir for Second Light
Rose Cook 