"The lodgings at the end of girlhood are not as advertised …
'The weight of our bodies, the heat of them; the thick waist of history; and the crush of possible futures, these poems reside on the lip of contemporary womanhood.
'Sometimes a poet’s voice seems to land with a satisfying thump, fully formed. Charlotte Guest’s is one such voice. Her elegant, tender and surprising lyrics are tuned, in her words, to ‘invisible forces’. Her learning, worn light, makes the suburban world strange and familiar all at once. Investigating in her debut Soap ‘the lodgings at the end of girlhood’ with both wit and heart-aching ambivalence, Guest is one to watch. Lucy Dougan
'These are clear-eyed poems, both tough and tender. Guest casts dappled light across the everyday. Emily Stewart' (Publication summary)
Dedication: For Mum and Dad and Gaby
'Don’t let the clean, wholesome title fool you – Charlotte Guest’s Soaphas a delightfully dirty underbelly, like a dog that has been scrapping in the mud. This grit is evident from the opening poem, “Harvest” (1), which at first blush is a celebration of the birthing rite: “The strongest women on earth farm / the cassava,” we are told, and “They sing / the root from the ground / against empty bellies and the prospect / of rot.” The eternal struggle of women to beget life even as they must sustain their own lives is at the core of this poem, but Guest darkens the piece, warning that what is born is not always nourishing: “when prepared incorrectly, / the root produces cyanide,” she declares, and “We are advised to opt for a different dessert.” Is this a covert warning to the reader? There will be some risk, it seems, in encountering these strange and marvellous poems.' (Introduction)
'Don’t let the clean, wholesome title fool you – Charlotte Guest’s Soaphas a delightfully dirty underbelly, like a dog that has been scrapping in the mud. This grit is evident from the opening poem, “Harvest” (1), which at first blush is a celebration of the birthing rite: “The strongest women on earth farm / the cassava,” we are told, and “They sing / the root from the ground / against empty bellies and the prospect / of rot.” The eternal struggle of women to beget life even as they must sustain their own lives is at the core of this poem, but Guest darkens the piece, warning that what is born is not always nourishing: “when prepared incorrectly, / the root produces cyanide,” she declares, and “We are advised to opt for a different dessert.” Is this a covert warning to the reader? There will be some risk, it seems, in encountering these strange and marvellous poems.' (Introduction)
'Shastra Deo’s poems seem to inhabit the same symbolic space. This makes The Agonist recall something like Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares (though there may be much more recent and current examples outside the scope of my reading) despite the fact that the tone of the poems is much different. But you feel that there is a continuous symbolic landscape that the poems inhabit even though different poems occupy different parts of that landscape. Generally, the poems, as the title suggests, are about conflicts but these conflicts are never the clash of immovable objects or positions. An even more important principle in the mini-mythology Deo has created is that conflicts involve interpenetrations: these are poems where the border lines between one individual and another, or between an individual and the world are, if clearly defined, important sites of definition, mapping and change. Though many of the poems explore relationships between individuals, these are often people who have some sort of stake with each other, as lovers, brothers, parents and children.' (Introduction)
