All the Prayers in the House

by Miriam Nash

Overview

Miriam Nash spent her early years on the Isle of Erraid off the west coast of Scotland, where Robert Louis Stevenson’s family once worked as lighthouse engineers. Voices of the island echo through her first collection, All the Prayers in the House, which holds at its heart the rupture and re-imagining of a family. Bold, honest, playful and inventive, the collection travels far from its coastal beginnings, crossing the Atlantic, visiting a women’s prison and a 17th-century ladies dictionary. Here are poems of ritual and transgression, safety and danger. They take the form of songs, letters, fragments, formal verse – many kinds of prayer perhaps, for many kinds of storm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780373638
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	07/03/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	235 KB

About the Author

Miriam Nash was born in 1985 in Inverness and grew up in Scotland, England and Wales. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and graduated with an MFA in 2014. She has performed her work internationally, and brought poetry into schools, museums, mental health organisations and prisons in the UK, USA and Singapore. She was the first Writer in Residence at Greenway, Agatha Christie’s summer home, as part of Writing Places with the National Trust, Literature Works and The Poetry Archive. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines, and her pamphlet, Small Change (flipped eye), was published in 2013. She received an Eric Gregory from the Society of Authors in 2015, and was runner-up for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award in 2016. Her first book-length collection, All the Prayers in the House, was published by Bloodaxe in 2017.

Table of Contents

Vesper 11

To Tend a Light 12

The Lights 13

The Mother Tells Her Daughter of a Storm 14

The Wife's Apology 15

Last Fish 16

Letter to R.L.S. 17

Letter from R.L.S. 18

Ghazal for R.L.S. 20

Of His Bones 21

Song of the Mainland 22

A Lightkeeper Must Be a Man of Parts 24

Prayer for My Father as a Child 25

The Arrangement 26

It's Not Your Fault, They Said to the Girl 27

The Walking Father Blues 28

The A38 30

Stepmother 31

The Single Mother 32

Aemplia 33

Fair 34

The Mother Praises Head Lice 36

The Mother's Triple Clock 37

A Plumper 38

Love Song for My Parents, 20 Years Divorced 39

Anger in Ladies (an erasure) 40

The Father's Caesarean 42

Sink 43

The Black and Blue Boy 44

Shoplifte 45

Ladies of Valhalla 46

Higher Maths 48

Her Place 49

Good Friday 50

At Torcross 51

At My Parents' Wedding 52

Michaelmas Beast 53

The Story of the Bones 54

The Task 56

The Wedding Vow 57

Sister Widdershins 58

Guide 59

The Wishing Stone 60

Love Song for a Keeper 61

Dear Mother Father God 62

Notes 64