Flamingo

Kathryn Bevis’s Flamingo introduces us to a troupe of wild, remarkable, unique, and captivating poems, bringing us into touch with life and our own embodiment: our births and deaths, our struggles and joys, doing so with humour, dynamism, and spirit.

Formally inventive all the poems take startling and original angles on their subject matter. Often, animals are companions on the journeys that these poems make. Starlings speak in a collective flock to remind us that individualism is not the rule for all creatures. A squid trapped in a fridge echoes the collective lockdown of ‘2020’, and the grieving rituals of animals illuminate a human separation. Cancer is posed as a ring-tailed lemur, capering through the sufferer’s body, and the titular ‘Flamingo’ imagines death as a flamboyant transformation where the speaker shapeshifts into the afterlife by becoming a flamingo herself.

Altogether, Flamingo is worth reading for its remarkable originality. Every poem in this book is a discovery and a joy.