We begin with a ‘lángos’ mistaken for ‘language’ and eaten by a small boy at a Hungarian lakeside. His mother, the poet, looks on with amusement at first, then with a more contemplative eye – how about the notion of eating language, pasting it in garlic and cheese and feeling it, warm inside our bellies? In the Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre, the lunchtime audience considers this, and most of us spend the next hour feeding off Pippa Little’s colourfully flavoured, sometimes exotic, sometimes hearty northern dishes. (Except for the man behind me, who steadily munches his way through a seemingly gargantuan apple with great determination.)
From Hungary, we travel to another childhood, the one in which the poet’s mother light-heartedly refers to the undressing of the child as the ‘skinning of the rabbit’. Little’s gentle voice takes us through the poem until at last the rabbit is ‘skinned, boned, bled’. In many of the poems to come, we are taken round similarly unexpected corners: we are drawn in by a passing observation, an interesting detail, an amused remark and are, a few stanzas later, left with an entirely new thought that we can take away, savour or digest slowly.
Little’s poems are as soft and clear as her voice: not demanding but nudging, presenting us with intricate paintings of places and people that come in the shape of sonnet, villanelle, free verse and sequence. We meet friends in Budapest, the women previously omitted from the Border ballads, miners decorating spar boxes for their daughters, a soldier in Afghanistan, a wheelbarrow and a bonfire site. Each of these characters is portrayed from a deeply-felt, novel point of view or is given a distinct voice. Like the glittering minerals pulled from the murk by miners, Little plucks details from the world, the imagination and the past, and crafts them into small treasures.
Little’s forthcoming collection, Overwintering, will undoubtedly bring a smile and a few bright thoughts to readers on a cold winter’s evening. Her previous collection Spar Box (2006) is published by Vane Women, and Foray, Border Reiver Women (2009) is available from Biscuit Publishing.
First Thursdays take place on the first Thursday of every month and last just under an hour. Bring a friend and some lunch (preferably of the non-crunchy variety) and enjoy and hour of (free) inspiration in the middle of your day.