The New Herbal by Fran Lock
and what of them? hardy stragglers
between wastelands, waste lanes
with the weather wetly trepanning
the factories. by junctions of squat
hope, the stooping of resolute
chimneys, i saw them: thin enough
to pass through the slit in a cat's
eye yellowly.
(from Daffodils)
There are very few remedies for the state we are in within the pages of Fran Lock’s The New Herbal: no subtle salves or solemn thorns are sufficient for our current condition. Yet somehow, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the resilience to survive through the violence, misinformation and injustice of our times can be found. Her flowers and herbs rant like end of the world preachers, spinning words into power, using dark humour with incantations of linguistic brilliance as shining acts of resistance.
“I’ll rise from peat, from spittle shade, from clammy sump” (The Language of Flowers)
“… we are dying. we are all
dying, but they did not get
the memo”
(Daffodils)
Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog-whisperer, cardigan wearer, amateur medievalist, poet, essayist and editor. She is the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, most recently Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023, and 'a disgusting lie': further adventures through the neoliberal hell-mouth (Pamenar Press, 2023). Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval Bestiary. Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, a collection of essays based on her work at Cambridge, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran is a Commissioning Editor at radical arts and culture cooperative Culture Matters, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review.
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