A Green Thought: A summer solstice poem by Katharine Towers

A poem for the summer solstice.

This never before published poem from Katharine Towers is the perfect poem to celebrate the summer solstice.

A Green Thought

Say instead it was an evening in head-high

bracken with its smell of dark and medicine.

Thinking green of the infecting fern

where you may crouch and not be known,

lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.

A bower is a dwelling place or once it was

a cage for pent-up singing birds.

Look down to see the warp and weft of root.

All the world is in these clutches.

Look up to clock the fern's drab underneath

blotched with spores you mustn't breathe.

Breathe in deep. There's nowhere else to live.


The Remedies

by Katharine Towers

Katharine Towers' second collection explores the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. The Remedies is a lyric, unforgettable collection which shows Towers emerging as a major poetic talent

The Floating Man

by Katharine Towers

Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory.