Carole Coates
Sharp and not-to-be-messed-with ( The Penniless Press), I am old enough to be confident in my work and still young enough to find the whole thing fun. Politically aware but not polemical, lyrical but not literary, intense but not self-indulgent – my poems connect with the actual concerns of readers and listeners – it's robust words from the land of the healthy living about things that fascinate all of us ... (Envoi). 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, 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. You can read some of the poems here. My third collection Swallowing Stones will be published by Shoestring Press in June 2012. It's a narrative about a fictional and dystopian country and it's told in persona monologues. I like working with narrative and character and I found that describing a fictional country through other people's mouths gave me more scope to be autobiographical than many a “personal” lyric. |
News I took first prize in the Nottingham Open Poetry Competition in November 2011. Read the poem at The Nottingham Poetry Society website. Launch for Swallowing Stones 5th July 2012. The Storey Auditorium, Storey Institute for Lancaster Litfest. I'm also reading at Poem and a Pint on 14th April at Greenodd Village Hall. I'm reading with Sixfold on 24th May in Lancaster. |
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.
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“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 “I like the ease of the literary and historical reference, the sense of learning lightly worn, naturalised in fact to the poetic texture.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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Readings
I am an experienced performer, offering a lively reading of poems which vary from a satirical homage to Tracey Emin to off-beat accounts of the post-religious universe, by way of elegies, poems of love and anorexia and engagements with John Osborne, God and other tyrants. The anorexia poems have been particularly well-received at readings. Carole's poems were pure, eerie and sent shivers down the spine. The poem “Stalker” was a real spine-chiller. I would urge anyone who has not bought her book “The Goodbye Edition” to purchase one. (www.wordmarket.org.uk/page4.htm) I am also a member of Sixfold, a performance group. We put on poetry shows – reading our poems round particular themes. “Water” and “Childhood” have both proved popular. I also help to organise a series of poetry readings in Lancaster The April Poets. I also give readings in the Lancaster Litfest Classic Author Series where we present the poetry of, for example Thomas Hardy or Emily Dickinson, or the prose of Thackeray of M.R. James. |
Other Publications I am published regularly in the literary press (The Rialto, London Magazine, Smith's Knoll, Other Poetry, Acumen, Staple, The Interpreter's House, Envoi, Scintilla, New Welsh Review, The Frogmore Papers and many others). My poem “Daughters” is in The Forward Book of Poetry 2005. I've been placed in competitions such as The Peterloo Anthology and The Arvon Poetry Competition Anthology and other anthologies. My poems have appeared in The Daily Mirror in Carol Ann Duffy's poetry column. I was given a Yorkshire Arts Award. I've also published critical writing: 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. |