Description
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022
A PBS Recommendation Summer 2022
In her debut collection, Denise Saul explores family and identity as she tells the story of a mother's illness and subsequent aphasia, and a daughter's ongoing role as carer. At the heart of their relationship is an awareness of the inadequacies of language to name painful experiences as together they start to know the world afresh.
Deeply affecting, the book finds a space for both the extraordinary and the ordinary, balancing all that is between. Such betweenness creates a space to explore wider dynamics of power, and the epiphanies and aftershocks of ongoing loss.
About the Author
Denise is the author of two pamphlets. White Narcissi (Flipped Eye Publishing) was Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and House of Blue (Rack Press) was PBS Pamphlet Recommendation. She is the recipient of Poetry Society's Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and Fellow of The Complete Works. Denise holds a PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from University of Roehampton. She was awarded Arts Council England's Grant for the Arts Award, for the delivery of her video poem collaborative project, Silent Room: A Journey of Language. Her project can be found at http://www.silent-room.net.
Reviews
'In the title poem of in The Room Between Us, Denise Saul strikes her minimalist, eerie unforgettable note. A true stylist, Saul is somehow both delicate and bold, her prose poems studied, her lines impeccable. [...] As in a fairytale, language is power and sometimes withholding is the only power left to the patient, "The women hid their tongues when men did not listen to them . . ." Like Lilith in Eden, Saul doesn't name like a coloniser, she listens, her silences are powerful.'
Martina Evans, The Irish Times
'The book explores the ways families go on interacting with each other when language fails, collapses or is rendered insufficient. [...] As the collection develops, we become aware of how bodily agency, a looming sense of frustration and hope, all work together to complicate individualism. [...] Silence is part of the caregiving experience. The gaps or spaces between lines, horizontally and vertically, are used to build boundaries between body and language. Some poems in the collection follow other experiences of loss: the death of a parent and sibling. In The Room Between Us, what is said and unsaid also invokes a close connection with nature and sound.'Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin
'The relationship between a carer and a sick person can be one of the most intimate of our lives; The Room Between Us encourages us to consider how language transforms a personal experience into a universal one.'
SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon
'Denise Saul's The Room Between Us is, among many things, a liminal space. Rather than simply recreating the four walls of her mother's care home room, and then adorning them with lyric and imagery, Saul conjures a boundlessly expansive territory that imagines the gardens, sitting rooms, and attics of the mind.'
Ariana Benson, Magma Poetry
'Experimental in its use of voice, ellipsis and elegiac prose poetry, The Room Between Us offers a poignant narrative of love and grief, of speech recovery and of silence, capturing the unspeakable and inconsolable across physical, temporal and emotional spaces.'
Jennifer Wong, The Poetry Review
'In Denise Saul's The Room Between Us, "room" becomes a metaphor for the physical four walls in which carer and cared for are contained... serious illness can be a period when time appears to slow down and all the tiny and previously unconsidered details of life: sights, sounds smells become increasingly intensified. Capturing this in unsentimental language is what makes this collection so compelling.' Susan Jane Sims, ARTEMISpoetry
'Family and sickness are also at the heart of Denise Saul's The Room Between Us... A numbed blankness is what gives these poems their poignancy.' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
'Denise [Saul] rewrites the narrative for women in mourning... ultimately, Saul's collection is a reclamation that makes time for mundanity and complexity.' Holly Moberley
'Beyond the literal, there is also magic, brightness and colour in these poems... Saul's style is condensed and thoughtful; a reader may sense loss and emotive power, and may find themselves engaging with a poem after it has ended... a beautiful collection, which is layered and imagistic in its interpretation of deeply personal experience.' Maria Taylor, Under the Radar
'The Room Between Us is energetic but delicate, covering issues of care, family love, dread, and reflection in a very personal and contemporary way.' Lauren-Marie Kennedy, Dundee University Review of the Arts
Book Information
ISBN 9781800854857
Author Denise Saul
Format Paperback
Page Count 52
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press
