A child travels down her own oesophagus, a woman joins a search party to look for herself, one grief-stricken soul descends into a watery underworld whilst another experiences love as demonic possession.... By turns wryly humorous, tender and heartbroken, Fantastic Voyage takes us on journeys into our hidden and ghostly selves, our insides and our 'other', exploring the myriad ways in which the human body gives voice to unspeakable truths.
These poems put us in and alongside bodies that are ill, out of control and inhabited - our dark innards as harbingers of secrets and fears, the gut as fortune-teller and home to ghosts. The book's central long poem, Notes on Water - a meditation on water - charts a deeply personal voyage through grief and loss. Two contrasting voices attempt to navigate a devastated world as both a corporeal and visceral experience, one grounded, the other hallucinatory. In other dreamlike experiences, the poems glimpse absent bodies as apparitions, doppelgängers and hauntings, and our visible selves as beings we cannot always recognise. Readers can listen to the original BBC Radio 3 version of Notes on Water using a QR code printed in the book.
***
She's at the pictures with her dador maybe she's at home watchingTV with her mum or on her own,and she's shrunk.- Fantastic Voyage
***
(@BloodaxeBooks, 23 May 2024, e-galley, 72 pages, ARC from the Publisher via @edelweiss_squad)
***
***
This is my first time reading the poet. I really enjoyed Fantastic Voyage. The poems are all well-written, imaginative and engaging as well as entertaining. The poems in this collection are the perfect blend of light and dark. The poems are intense at times but there's a lot of humour as well which makes them shine. They are very imaginative. I especially liked the title poem, When Andrea Was 7, One Day I Was Sawn In Half, Three Hauntings, Missing and Like A Tree. I'd recommend this collection.
