NORTH BY NORTH NORTH
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In her debut pamphlet North by Northnorth, Elvire Roberts goes off-compass to find the vanishing point towards True North.
She treads her way through queerness in all its meanings: eccentric, Queer, questionable, unwell and downright weird. Her poems ask how a person can bear to be in this world and still find true expression of themselves in their complex flux of identities. There is guidance from Daoism and Buddhism, but above all from the natural world, as questions shapeshift to emerge as insects, mammals, cephalopods, birds. At its heart, North by Northnorth asks how the human animal can move from surviving to thriving. It is published by Five Leaves Press and available to order from Five Leaves bookshop as well as your local bookstore. |
Reviews - excerpts |
Magma 89: review by Cheryl Moksowitz
In North by Northnorth Roberts [...] veers wildly off-compass in search of something newer, stranger, queerer, less familiar. These are poems that explore fragility, the natural world, metamorphosis in human, animal and mineral form, as well as the supernatural, the spiritual, and the psyche. This may sound like an impossibly intellectual expedition, and it is, but what is most remarkable is the inventiveness with which it is undertaken. Each page presents a surprise, something new to puzzle over and to learn from.
Roberts writes playfully and invites the reader to play along. There are poems here whose sections are segmented by dotted lines marked with scissor symbols, suggesting the work is there for cutting up and messing about with, should we so wish. This is visual poetry. The six-line sonorous verses in Beautiful demoiselle are laid out inside hexagonal shapes and tessellated into two flower shapes across a double spread – a fun job for the designer and a delight for the eye of the reader too. The word ‘demoiselle’ has several definitions: a) a small, graceful crane; b) a damselfly; and c) slang: an unmarried girl or woman. Is it mad that I also saw the word ‘mademoiselle’ stripped of its own (mad)ness, as an invitation to lose my mind and not search too hard for logic?
Language, so many languages - from all corners of the globe - feature here. Some real, some invented no doubt,
although perhaps their origins are all due north of where our usual encounters take us. In places, certain letters
seem to be formed of hieroglyphs, but I trust this poet, and sense that everything has been mined from a true
source, has purpose and is waiting to be drilled for deeper meaning.
In North by Northnorth Roberts [...] veers wildly off-compass in search of something newer, stranger, queerer, less familiar. These are poems that explore fragility, the natural world, metamorphosis in human, animal and mineral form, as well as the supernatural, the spiritual, and the psyche. This may sound like an impossibly intellectual expedition, and it is, but what is most remarkable is the inventiveness with which it is undertaken. Each page presents a surprise, something new to puzzle over and to learn from.
Roberts writes playfully and invites the reader to play along. There are poems here whose sections are segmented by dotted lines marked with scissor symbols, suggesting the work is there for cutting up and messing about with, should we so wish. This is visual poetry. The six-line sonorous verses in Beautiful demoiselle are laid out inside hexagonal shapes and tessellated into two flower shapes across a double spread – a fun job for the designer and a delight for the eye of the reader too. The word ‘demoiselle’ has several definitions: a) a small, graceful crane; b) a damselfly; and c) slang: an unmarried girl or woman. Is it mad that I also saw the word ‘mademoiselle’ stripped of its own (mad)ness, as an invitation to lose my mind and not search too hard for logic?
Language, so many languages - from all corners of the globe - feature here. Some real, some invented no doubt,
although perhaps their origins are all due north of where our usual encounters take us. In places, certain letters
seem to be formed of hieroglyphs, but I trust this poet, and sense that everything has been mined from a true
source, has purpose and is waiting to be drilled for deeper meaning.
The North 70: review by Ian McMillan
In North by Northnorth Elvire Roberts examines the power and powerlessness of language to help us tell our stories. Language is powerful because it articulates meaning and it's powerless because sometimes the meaning that gets articulated isn't quite the one we wanted to articulate but it's as close as we can get, as she says in 'KUN,' the opening poem: 'Imagine a sea where imagination outstrips itself.' The pamphlet is packed with visually striking work, the sections of KUN separated by dotted lines and images of scissors,'Beautiful demoiselle' made up of hexagonal word- containers and 'Concertina' moving down the page in skinny phrases separated by forward and back slashes. The effect isn't gimmicky or showy, though: the poems are enhanced and underlined by these approaches and they take me deeper into the work. North by Northnorth is one of the most striking debuts l've read for ages, and I can't wait to read what Elvire Roberts does next.
In North by Northnorth Elvire Roberts examines the power and powerlessness of language to help us tell our stories. Language is powerful because it articulates meaning and it's powerless because sometimes the meaning that gets articulated isn't quite the one we wanted to articulate but it's as close as we can get, as she says in 'KUN,' the opening poem: 'Imagine a sea where imagination outstrips itself.' The pamphlet is packed with visually striking work, the sections of KUN separated by dotted lines and images of scissors,'Beautiful demoiselle' made up of hexagonal word- containers and 'Concertina' moving down the page in skinny phrases separated by forward and back slashes. The effect isn't gimmicky or showy, though: the poems are enhanced and underlined by these approaches and they take me deeper into the work. North by Northnorth is one of the most striking debuts l've read for ages, and I can't wait to read what Elvire Roberts does next.
Tears in the Fence 80: review by Joanna Nissel
‘Imagine a sea where imagining outstrips itself’, writes Elvire Roberts, as the opening to her debut pamphlet, North by Northnorth. Fittingly, Roberts’ imaginings outstrip anthropocentrism and heteronormativity, offering a poetry rich with detail that immerses the reader in vibrant, queer, and often more than human perspectives.
[...] Roberts’ attention to form is consistent throughout the pamphlet, as is her emphasis on a multiplicity of reading methods. In the ‘Kun’ series, spread throughout the book, she invites the reader to cut up the poem and reorder it as they please. Particularly since Roberts opens the book with ‘Kun’, I felt this highlighted both the agency of the reader and the subjectivity of experience.
Further inventive forms continue to appear, such as poems with no title and placed within stanza-length brackets, poems first broken up by a giant slash and then the absence of that slash, poems that leap between left and right-aligned margins and prose poems in columns –one depicting a tightrope seen from above. Through Roberts’ explicit invitation to the reader to play with the text, she affirms that there is no correct order in which to read the poems, rather, readers are empowered to have their own experience. Particularly as a queer writer who works as a signed language interpreter, Roberts keeps open the possibility of poetic and lived experiences that exist outside of heteronormative, able-bodied (and human-bodied) conventions, represented by the traditional top-to-bottom, left-to-right, chronological poem.
[...] As a small aside, Roberts’ new collaborative collection with the poet Rachel Goodman, Knee to Knee, likewise expands the possibilities of the English language, with the two creating their own punctuation marks to better represent the experience of womanhood.
North by NorthNorth continues the experimental tradition of multiplicity found in works by writers such as Carlyle Reedy or Maggie O’Sullivan, which Tarlo describes as sharing ‘provisionality, a refusal to tell a simple story or resolve into a single meaning, and [a] clearly related exploration of experimentation with language’, and, in the particular case of Reedy, creating forms that encourage multiple reading pathways. As such, Roberts’ debut rewards reading and rereading and celebrates divergences of interpretations that might arise. As Roberts says, ‘to look is to see / is to decide’.
‘Imagine a sea where imagining outstrips itself’, writes Elvire Roberts, as the opening to her debut pamphlet, North by Northnorth. Fittingly, Roberts’ imaginings outstrip anthropocentrism and heteronormativity, offering a poetry rich with detail that immerses the reader in vibrant, queer, and often more than human perspectives.
[...] Roberts’ attention to form is consistent throughout the pamphlet, as is her emphasis on a multiplicity of reading methods. In the ‘Kun’ series, spread throughout the book, she invites the reader to cut up the poem and reorder it as they please. Particularly since Roberts opens the book with ‘Kun’, I felt this highlighted both the agency of the reader and the subjectivity of experience.
Further inventive forms continue to appear, such as poems with no title and placed within stanza-length brackets, poems first broken up by a giant slash and then the absence of that slash, poems that leap between left and right-aligned margins and prose poems in columns –one depicting a tightrope seen from above. Through Roberts’ explicit invitation to the reader to play with the text, she affirms that there is no correct order in which to read the poems, rather, readers are empowered to have their own experience. Particularly as a queer writer who works as a signed language interpreter, Roberts keeps open the possibility of poetic and lived experiences that exist outside of heteronormative, able-bodied (and human-bodied) conventions, represented by the traditional top-to-bottom, left-to-right, chronological poem.
[...] As a small aside, Roberts’ new collaborative collection with the poet Rachel Goodman, Knee to Knee, likewise expands the possibilities of the English language, with the two creating their own punctuation marks to better represent the experience of womanhood.
North by NorthNorth continues the experimental tradition of multiplicity found in works by writers such as Carlyle Reedy or Maggie O’Sullivan, which Tarlo describes as sharing ‘provisionality, a refusal to tell a simple story or resolve into a single meaning, and [a] clearly related exploration of experimentation with language’, and, in the particular case of Reedy, creating forms that encourage multiple reading pathways. As such, Roberts’ debut rewards reading and rereading and celebrates divergences of interpretations that might arise. As Roberts says, ‘to look is to see / is to decide’.
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EVENTS
Reading at: Tears in the Fence festival 20-22 Sept 2024 Sat 21st September 2024, morning (BST) Stourpaine Village Hall, Dorset DT11 8TJ Launch of Apocalyptic Landscape anthology Wed 23rd October 2024, 18:30 (BST) Central Library, Leeds LS1 3AB |
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
'Living the Dream' in the anthology Apocalyptic Landscape, ed. Steve Ely, pub. Valley Press in October 2024, available for pre-order. |
