Di Slaney is
a poet, publisher and animal sanctuary founder. Herd Queen, her second full collection of poems, is as technically
dazzling as it is emotionally nuanced. Since
2005, Di has been filling her ancient Nottinghamshire farmhouse and its land
with more livestock than is sensible: Manor Farm Charitable Trust is home to over
170 animals at the last count, many of them with special physical or
behavioural needs. Herd Queen boasts
eloquent animal sketches including Mayhem the Herdwick sheep and the tale of a
nocturnal poetry slam run by mice; sea-salt childhood memories – taste the rain
– and an exuberant riff on Christopher Smart that serves as a hymn to manure, ‘Jubilate
Excreta’. (‘For when you fall in it you will always find the biggest pile.’) Di
has produced yarn from her rare breed and rescued flock and, from a tangle of folkloric
witch-wool to a jumper-bundled British childhood, wool threads many of the
poems together. But Di is
acute and affecting on human relationships, too, granting vivid windows into
richly imagined lives both contemporary and historical. Love letters come from
Libya and desperate postcards from Powys; Lord Byron puffs and preens at his
reflection; Elizabeth Broughton defends herself in an eighteenth-century
courtroom; village characters are skewered with wicked wit. Her deeply moving
collaboration with composer Omar Shahryar is based on his family’s experiences
of evacuation from Saudi Arabia in 1990. Herd
Queen’s heroines remember teenage trysts, do battle with the slings and
arrows of ageing, collage a poem from Prince lyrics and dream of achieving
Shirley Bassey-hood in their seventies. This is a constantly surprising, deeply
satisfying book from a writer at the top of her game. ‘Wherever she goes in
this wide-ranging collection, Di Slaney’s sophisticated, ambitious poems take
the reader – moved, enthralled – right along with her’ Jonathan Edwards ‘A tender and tactile collection from
a poet who writes with a full and joyously mud-splattered heart’ Seán Hewitt ‘Robust and earthy,
subtle and direct by turn… often witty and sometimes wicked’ Paula Meehan