Publication: 13 May 2023
ISBN 978-1-9151081-2-8
Jane McKie’s poems in Carnation Lily Lily Rose often reflect on the natural world, but they reveal other hidden worlds to the attentive and quizzical eye. Mysterious and alluring, you’re never quite taken where you expect from the minute you start reading this book.
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Pool
I wake to leaves, to their paper, their river-dip scent.
They are skin cells borne to the surface by sleep,
lifting, peeling, shaking their detachment in my face,
and behind their tissue, wooden bones
that bow to swim my channels like ships.
It is water, of course, that fortifies, water that fills
every available space. I felt it this morning, inside me,
the great beast’s whirlpool coil as it turned back
to the deep. And then dressed itself as a human being.
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“There is much about skin — human, plant, animal — in this wonderful collection of poems from Jane McKie. Here, the glittering surfaces of the world are read as divinatory antennae, winkling out what connects us to our watery abode on planet earth. This is a hymn to all the different kinds of connective tissue that lightly, but firmly, weave us into the fabric of our own and others’ lives. All the poems here reach beyond the reader’s initial expectations of them, surprising and delighting us just as the natural world itself so often does. Rarely does a collection of artfully patterned lines manage to match the complexity of earth’s myriad surfaces.” —David Kinloch
“Carnation Lily Lily Rose is a stunning collection. Jane McKie is a conjuror with words: always finding the word that is both surprising and yet fits into place as if always meant to be there. Her poems unfold like paper flowers in water: never predictable, always enticing, gradually revealing their riches and secrets. Each leads us on a sensory journey from the world as we know it into the visionary worlds of her imagination.” —Vicki Feaver
