A Child’s Last Picture of the Zoo by Louise Warren

Linguistically skilful, subtle and quietly disturbing, Louise Warren’s poetry has the power to resonate in the mind long after reading. In this outstanding debut collection, animals whose images are caught in spoons at the British museum speak disquieting truths about life and loss whilst the zoo at night is a place of shadow, unease and open endings. Warren unearths the strange voices of objects and surprises with images that twist and change; her ‘house’ unsettles us – it is a skirt pulled down over her knees, a knot of hair, a fingernail – it is both the place and the person that appears at the foot of the bed ‘tall and thin’, menacing – ‘the same shape pressed into the sheets’.‘Table work’ is a seance for a just buried husband whose marks are still on the table, his breadcrumbs still in the cracks so that ‘he is seeding in the barley sugar legs’. Moving from the fable-like, shadow-filled world of the child to moments of grief, from the natural world as metaphor for loss and change to the ghosts we live with, Louise Warren brings a distinctive perspective to these tight, lyrical poems.

Louise Warren is a poet and playwright. Her poems have been published in Agenda, Envoi, Fuselit, The Interpreters House, Orbis (featured Poet), Obsessed by Pipework, Poetry Monthly, Stand, Seam, Poetry Wales, The New Writer and The Rialto. She was in the Ver Poetry Prize Anthology 2008. Her poems have also appeared in a number of anthologies. Louise was the winner of the 2011 Cinnamon Press first collection prize and A Child’s Last Picture Book Of The Zoo, is her debut collection.