Elizabeth Rimmer (@haggardherbs) is a poet, a poetry editor for Red Squirrel Press and occasional translator. The Well of the Moon is her fourth collection and she has also published a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Charm of Nine Herbs. Her website is www.burnedthumb.com

 

The Well of the Moon was provoked by a momentary total loss of memory, which raised questions about the kinds of knowledge and connection with the world which create the self-understanding of ‘a person’. Including translations and responses to poems in Latin, Old English, Old Norse and Irish, it considers place, perception and language, memory, myth and community, human and more-than human and reflects on how the pandemic has impacted on those issues.

 

‘These poems pull us in, ask us to look again, re-evaluate our own relationships with the natural world around us, fall in love all over again. Elizabeth doesn’t shrink from the difficult in these poems, but brings us with her to face it over and over again. In doing so, she shows us how one finds “her own place”. I love the way Elizabeth’s poems listen and respond to the living things around her—from the smallest weed to cormorants to cows— almost as if, by reading her words, we’re slowly learning how we might engage with the shape of the land around us, and all the miraculous living things that inhabit it.’

 

—Marjorie Lofti

 

‘Elizabeth Rimmer’s poems in The Well of the Moon are records of accurate detail assembling particular things through an emotional structuring of language which ensures a sensitised apprehension of the world, from wrens to rainbows, from weeds to ways of water, light and air, their taste and scent, their sound and language. All these careful noticings, of plants, vegetables, birds, geographies of actual place and tentative emotional uncovering, accumulate gently to a book that teaches unobtrusively a sharp sustained attention.’

 

—Alan Riach

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