What do you wear to Paris? Ami and I discussed it for hours but I still couldn’t think of anything suitable. Ami said a trench coat with nothing underneath but your best underwear. That was only if some boy was meeting you at the airport, I said. Eighteen-year-old Lisette has just arrived in Paris (France!) […]

Catherine Bateson’s new poetry collection has at its centre three lively sequences that address the hard graft of spiritual negotiation. Imagined for present, past and future times, each of them tracks the slow and the sudden dissolution of love – yet love stories they are. Her characters are distinctly and originally conceived, with a habitual […]

At the heart of this collection is the powerful sequence “Notes from Ward Seven West”. It opens with the haunting meditation “This Is the Poem”, winner of the prestigious John Shaw Neilson Award. In poems about women and their lives as daughters, lovers, wives and mothers, Bateson plays with different voices adeptly and compassionately. Longer […]