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.
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The words I used to use to rest myself have settled on the shelf above the sink VESPER
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 3 July 2017, e-book, 64 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveLibs)
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I've never heard of the poet before. I wanted to read the poetry collection because I love the image on the cover and I live in Scotland so the fact the poet lived off the west coast on an island appealed to me. I really enjoyed all of the poems in this collection. The poems are very different in style, structure and tone. I prefer this to reading a collection with poems that deal with the same themes and ideas so can be almost too like each other. I liked the inventiveness and playfulness. Nash is a very skilled poet. I particularly enjoyed the few poems where she imagines writing to Robert Louise Stevenson about them both living on Erraid. My favourite poems are Letter to R.L.S, Letter from R.L.S, Ghazal for R.L.S, Of His Bones and Love Song for My Parents, 20 Years Divorced.
