Small Pointed Things

Punctuated by rhyme and shaped by traditional forms, the poems in Small Pointed Things turn encounters with the natural world and scenes from family life into acts of self-discovery. Poignant and funny in equal measure, many of these poems address human concerns by comically reimagining them through the analogous 'lives' of plants and animals – from snowdrops to love-lies-bleeding, manatees to warthogs, scorpions and moths to bats and swallows. Animals and insects provide opportunities for reflection: the difference between bats and swallows unpacks the complexity of spousal relations, two down-and-out warthogs arouse sudden, if unwarranted shame, and a pair of singing blackbirds tenderly expose the secret to marital compatibility and compromise. There are also poems about poetry and ideas, lasting love and grief. Formally deft and classically inspired, with hints of Wordsworth, Frost and Marianne Moore, the poems in Small Pointed Things seek to uncover various forms of knowledge while taking aim, ultimately, at knowingness itself.

'One glimpse of his carapace
will shock us –
brandishing pincers like maracas –
and his sting, the coup de grâ ce!'
(from 'The Scorpion')

Erica McAlpine is Associate Professor of English at Oxford and the A.C. Cooper Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall. Her book The Poet's Mistake appeared from Princeton University Press in 2020; a collection of poems, The Country Gambler, was published by Shearsman in 2016.