Miranda Pearson – författare

Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.

The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.

Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt.

Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”

Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see.

The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment.

Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt.

Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”

In Prime, Miranda Pearsons first collection of poetry, the narratives of female identity, the white wedding, and the enshrined position of the mother are interrogated, using the lyric as a form of cultural critique in an examination and mockery of romantic love and heterosexual relationships. At the same time, the poems constitute an irreverent, lush romp, a celebration of friendship and absurdity.

Gritty and darkly humorous, Pearsons verses address modern myths head-on in a world where love watches itself critically and consciously. Everything is unravelled in poems that disentangle pregnancy from motherhood, custody from caregiving, marriage from love, sex from gender, only to weave these concepts back together in startling new patterns. Pearson deliberately trips over the picket fences of proprieties and sensitivities that surround the New Age marriage. The sacred and profane are crossed daily with frankness, toughness, and warmth. In Prime, British humour and psychoanalytic and feminist theory meet under the poets steady gaze.

In Prime, Miranda Pearson’s first collection of poetry, the narratives of female identity, the white wedding, and the enshrined position of the mother are interrogated, using the lyric as a form of cultural critique in an examination and mockery of romantic love and heterosexual relationships. At the same time, the poems constitute an irreverent, lush romp, a celebration of friendship and absurdity.

Gritty and darkly humorous, Pearson’s verses address modern myths head-on in a world where love watches itself critically and consciously. Everything is unravelled in poems that disentangle pregnancy from motherhood, custody from caregiving, marriage from love, sex from gender, only to weave these concepts back together in startling new patterns. Pearson deliberately trips over the picket fences of proprieties and sensitivities that surround the New Age marriage. The sacred and profane are crossed daily with frankness, toughness, and warmth. In Prime, British humour and psychoanalytic and feminist theory meet under the poet’s steady gaze.