Kate Ashton was born in Scotland and trained as a nurse at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, before joining the editorial staff of Nursing Times. Later, in Rotterdam, she wrote for Mills &Boon, then published a biography and a monograph in the Frisian language. She returned to Scotland in 2003, and has had poems published in magazines including Shearsman and THE SHOp.
This is a beautifully constructed, porcelain filigree masterpiece of a sequence. Ashton is clearly an accomplished poet, and can scale aesthetic heights with seeming ease. The eleven dense passages making up the twenty page sequence construct a kind of ‘herstory’ of female liminality and disordered identity, heavy with allegory, where ‘All freedom/passes into dread, the place/beyond the portico, unsheltered and unled.’
Ashton makes skilled, musical use of assonantal rhyme, which she layers through the long lines to create a delicious tapestry which begs to be read aloud:
before, behind cantor and scroll, serenity, a flare, vivid but innocent of heat and bare, unclothed of all but bliss that lit silk raiment and consumed the law, a naked sword passing presage into the blood and pouring precedent where stone had stood before.
Male experience and sexual encounters enter the fray in sequences like ‘Quasimodo’ and ‘I ask him who he is, he says no.’ These remind me of Hughes’ early ‘Crow’ sequence – distorted, hopeless figures shambling miserably towards each other while their sadistic deity laughs.
Although I think that Ashton occasionally slips too far into ornament (something we are all guilty of), and can find no obvious justification for the line-indentations which recall much older forms, I think this is a fascinating, meaty mouthful of a first collection.
This is a beautifully constructed, porcelain filigree masterpiece of a sequence. Ashton is clearly an accomplished poet, and can scale aesthetic heights with seeming ease. The eleven dense passages making up the twenty page sequence construct a kind of ‘herstory’ of female liminality and disordered identity, heavy with allegory, where ‘All freedom/passes into dread, the place/beyond the portico, unsheltered and unled.’
Ashton makes skilled, musical use of assonantal rhyme, which she layers through the long lines to create a delicious tapestry which begs to be read aloud:
before, behind cantor and scroll, serenity, a flare, vivid but innocent of heat and bare, unclothed of all but bliss that lit silk raiment and consumed the law, a naked sword passing presage into the blood and pouring precedent where stone had stood before.
Male experience and sexual encounters enter the fray in sequences like ‘Quasimodo’ and ‘I ask him who he is, he says no.’ These remind me of Hughes’ early ‘Crow’ sequence – distorted, hopeless figures shambling miserably towards each other while their sadistic deity laughs.
Although I think that Ashton occasionally slips too far into ornament (something we are all guilty of), and can find no obvious justification for the line-indentations which recall much older forms, I think this is a fascinating, meaty mouthful of a first collection.