Carole Coates
What sort of poet am I?
I'm female – and even today, female poets are still not as conspicuous as they might be. Although the new Poet Laureate will surely change that. It's been said that I have a distinctive slant on life drawn from a somewhat unusual mixture of social experiences – working class background, exclusive convent school education, 1970s Feminism, an academic career to which I stood at an angle – and so on. All this has resulted in a dissident commentary or exploration of life. I don't man the barricades but I have a strong suspicion of organisations and the people who flourish there. If you want to know more about my poetry, read some. There are some poems below.
My second collection Looking Good (published September 09 by Shoestring Press) examines the experience of anorexia endured as a student at a time when the condition was not diagnosed, discussed or even named. I read from "Looking Good" on 6th November 2009 at The Brewery, Kendal with Jennifer Copley. SixPoets celebrated the launch of "Looking Good" with a reading on Tuesday 8th December, at the Gregson Centre, Moor Lane, Lancaster. |
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Reading at The Brewery
Photograph of Carole Coates courtesy of Martin Copley - for more photographs of this event, visit Martin Copley's Photobox site |
“A troubled young woman, viewed through the lens of maturity, suffers, grows and emerges as her older and wiser self; a fragile reconciliation is reached. These poems revisit intense experience with painful honesty and wry humour.” “I like the ease of the literary and historical reference, the sense of learning lightly worn, naturalised in fact to the poetic texture. The poems are free of self-pity and have vitality and energy though dealing with the loss of both. They create a social world and the others' “characters” are an important part of this vitality.” |
These are some comments on my first collection The Goodbye Edition published by Shoestring Press (2005). “If there is any poem of the last ten years with which I am proud to be associated it is Because I Know So Many Dead People. It has a feeling for the numinous which has faded for many but which still lingers. It shows a combination of wit and deep feeling….. This is a new and original voice which I find exciting” “…. this challenging and fascinating collection……This group of poems is very strong, demonstrating Coates' delicacy of movement between images and her pared language, creating an elusive musicality. At times it is Metaphysical in its intensity and in its references…. Coates' range of subject matter is considerable as well as her technical ability…. This is a volume that excites and challenges.” “ …. shiftiness of perspective: an almost-seeing, a glimpse-of-the-ghost, in her work… it's robust words from the land of the healthy living about things that fascinate all of us, that none of us can understand. This unsteady ground lies under all her poetry…. all offer her vertiginous viewpoints that both startle and satisfy the reader. The Goodbye Edition lies in the territory of magic realism, but with a very particular map. It's an unusually powerful and interesting collection by a reliably accomplished poet. Don't miss it.” “Leaving the Job, an excellent little poem about the difference between drudging for money and being busy at tasks you believe in, as well as the bemused attitude of the institutionalised worker to the active free spirit, is typical of Carole Coates's easy, familiar style. She can be sharp and not-to-be-messed with too, as in The Bad Sex Gallery.” “With the glorious economy of the true poet, Coates makes both meanings relevant simultaneously…” |
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Other Publications and Readings I've been widely published in the literary press (The Rialto, Orbis, Acumen, Smiths Knoll, Other Poetry, Staple, London Magazine, The Interpreter's House, New Welsh Review, The Frogmore Papers, Envoi and many other magazines). My poem “Daughters” is in the Forward Book of Poetry 2005. I've been placed in competitions, such as The Peterloo Anthology and was represented in the 2004 Arvon Poetry Competition Anthology. I was given a Yorkshire Arts Award. I've recently given readings at The Blue Room, Newcastle; the Poetry Library, Edinburgh; Lancaster Litfest and The Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal. If you want me to do a reading, contact me at the link below. I've also published critical writing in an earlier incarnation: John Cowper Powys in Search of a Landscape (Macmillan 1982) and a students' edition of Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge (Heinemann 1996). I'm married to the critic John Coates. I live in Lancaster where I am a member of Sixpoets. |