Cold Snack

This is a new collection from a well-loved poet of suburbia, families, workplaces, ordinary life. The stunning first section explores the pains and pleasures (mostly the pains) of becoming a schoolteacher in midlife. The second section, 'televisioner', is a single long sequence that views the over-confident 1980s from the unlikely perspective of a receptionist for a television station. The poet plays with the news and the people and stories behind the news, remembering the Springbok tour, a bomb scare, the 'occasional politician' and the shock arrival of computers. In the third bittersweet and more intimate section lyricism combines with observation to produce some powerful poems to end the collection. All the poems show Charman's ear for the spoken language and her acute awareness of the sounds, shapes, colours around us and the way they are inhabited by our emotions.