Accidental Fruit
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Accidental Fruit is about the almost seen, the half remembered and the not quite touched, the silent collisions of past and present and the perpetual interweaving of childhood and age. It registers death as the moment where lived experience is transformed into history. But it is equally preoccupied with the absurdities of the school run and the small satisfactions of village gossip, the way the trees move on a windy day, and its own impossible efforts to pin down the sea.
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Accidental Fruit is about the almost seen, the half remembered and the not quite touched, the silent collisions of past and present and the perpetual interweaving of childhood and age. It registers death as the moment where lived experience is transformed into history. But it is equally preoccupied with the absurdities of the school run and the small satisfactions of village gossip, the way the trees move on a windy day, and its own impossible efforts to pin down the sea.
Painting the Sea
A piano might just do it.
If it were possible of course
to get one out there
and if one knew
how to hit the notes
as if shoving and elbowing,
shouldering grit and
chucking it quite so untidily,
letting each note slide
into another
like small stones
bruising their backs
on water. Next the rasp
of bristles on paint.
This is a picture. In the picture
a small piano
is being eaten by the sea
while fragments
of what look like paper
smudge the outline,
bounce and hop against the frame.
Published: 16 September 2016
ISBN: 978-1905208357
Pages: 64
“Sensed in the wind, Carolyn Oulton’s poems seek to weave fleeting glimpses, distant voices and material traces back together into a whole. The lyric voice is mother, academic, daughter and these different tones are called together into balance and imbued with grace. An attention to the detail of worldly life and the inevitable limits of poetic description, paradoxically, evoke a greater mystery, the sea on the horizon, the shifts in the light. Beautiful and searching these poems look for meaning in absences and do find it there, though out of sight and elsewhere.”
Eleanor Rees
“Carolyn Oulton’s world is meticulously observed and set down with a clarity that pierces the surface of things. Fresh, beautifully controlled and with a knack of transforming the quotidian Accidental Fruit brims with memory, daily rhythms, landscape, history and humanity; as engaging as it is accomplished.”
Jan Fortune
Carolyn Oulton is a Professor of Victorian Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. She has previously published The Rain (Sol), Left Past the Moon (National Poetry Foundation) and A Child, a Death and the Making of the Fairy Tale Woman (Bewrite Books), as well as biographies of Mary Cholmondeley and Jerome K. Jerome.
