ISBN: 9781913437466 

Price: £10.99

Publication date: 4^th August 2022

Format: Paperback

Extent: 72pp

DCF: Poetry Collections

Ramona Herdman’s Glut is a lush, entertaining, and bittersweet collection of poems about how we live together and find meaning through rules and rituals around food, family, alcohol, work, nature, sex and love. These vividly-realised, nimble poems probe at the delicate balancing acts we – our bodies and our minds – perform in life: between power and trust, between convention and rebellion, and between what is enough and what is too much.

All the time, Herdman’s spry poetry keeps a gimlet eye on our impulse to make sense of it all – of how we live and work together, and what strategies will help us to navigate our way through the tangled undergrowth of negotiation and misunderstanding. Glut is a lustrous, darkly funny, open-hearted book on the distance between people, on satisfying appetites, and on seeking both pleasure and consolation.

eatherette folds around the gearstick’ (‘The car after the car’). This is a stunning book about being disillusioned by the act of living, of managing a body and all its needs, and despite, or because of this, celebrating its softness, ‘I feel sorry for the soft places’ (‘Low pain threshold’). It is appropriate then that this miraculous collection ends on the word ‘love’ as the poems pulsate with that most essential of emotions, ‘Come home safe/Come home love’ (‘Night heart’). Glut is a true and rare gift.” - Victoria Kennefick