THE ROPE WALK
Seraph Press, 2013


A fictional family history; 24 poems from the voices of  a Scottish worker rope maker , to a tightrope walker of the 1990s; from a grieving mother on an immigrant ship, to the mystified cousin of a young sex-worker. The Rope Walk twists and binds the ties that connect these generations of a fictional family.

"...a dazzling work"

Buy The Rope Walk
Cover and linocut designed and printed by Joe Buchanan. The first edition is limited to 150 hand-numbered copies.

Extract

Reviews
Fatigue

I have to figure out fatigue.
I climb all day and spin and hold
my body in only the most treacherous
 
positions until I want to weep
with tiredness. I need warm food.
So now I climb. And when I can
 
do it no more I climb more. And some
thing stops me climbing and I override
the thing to climb again. Knowing
 
my body, its mass, when and how
muscles fail, the mechanics of it.
And the thing stops me and
 
I climb through the thing and
no matter how I try I can not climb until
I fall, over and over I try, thinking
 
I know what a body can do
and it can not do this.


Other poems from The Rope Walk availiable online
Ghosts
1989
Rope [Audio]
Finely balanced, taut, and strong - Takahe Magazine

Taut, linguistically striking and thematically inventive, The Rope Walk is a dazzling work - Landfall Review Online

I love this collection. I love the grace, the phrasings, the syntax — the flecks of life and the speckles of fiction that move you out of routine into the sheer pleasure of poetry - The Poetry Shelf

She has pared and honed the line to such a slim thing: an aesthetic of verbal simplicity yet psychological density - Emma Neale on The Poetry List, The Poetry Shelf, 2013.

An intriguing debut - Otago Daily Times, 2013.

While lyrical and pretty in places, The Rope Walk has teeth - Nelson Mail, 2013.

You can firmly smell the salty air - Booksellers NZ, 2013.

The characters are vividly alive, the stories resonant, the language lovely - Anna Jackson on The Poetry List, The Poetry Shelf, 2013.

These poems restore our sense of the rough, jagged edges of New Zealand, the uncertainty of existence – what is my role here? – and the dearth of solid answers -  Valley Voice, 2013.