Publisher's Synopsis
Winner of the 2011 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry The House Began to Pitch is a collection of poems that begins by following the lives of a man and a woman who grow up in the rural South in the fifties and sixties. Many of the poems are told through the lens of fairy tales as a comment on archetypal constructs that make up our ideals of home and family. The tragedies that affect the young lives of these characters influence them as they marry and age and as the book moves into the third section, which takes a more general and contemporary approach to domestic struggles.
The poems favour the imagistic and melodic, always with an attempt to make sense out of the conflict and chaos of our daily lives. The settings of a small town and farm in a South gone-by give a dramatic backdrop to the struggles of the characters and create an illuminating merger with fairy tales such as Cinderella, Winnie the Pooh, The Wizard of Oz, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These narratives serve as a familiar reminder of the dreams we hold in childhood and how reality fractures those story moulds, in both good ways and bad.
