Batten Down - Su Croll

Here is where our ruins / are falling in on themselves. Here / is where we ride out our grievance-parade/ and endless he-said she-said teetering / arguments in this world of dizzying / bumper car days

These are poems of Dorothy and the Witch in Oz, of cinematic mythologies and fractured fairy tales, inviting us to witness acts of grim revenge and reconsider the folkloric forests lodged in our collective minds.

With unsparing insight and rueful humour, Batten Down presents verse that rages across landscapes, in an era of increasingly thuggish leadership, where women press forward through persistent danger. Su Croll probes the cultural and historical forces that shape our present moment, indicting and questioning the twisted brutality Alfred Hitchcock visited upon his iconic blondes and the constricting circumstances endured by two wily Tudor queens. Throughout the collection, characters and situations function as a barbarous skeleton key to the confusions of our disordered, bouleversé culture.

Batten Down exposes our bruised, chaotic world, believing poetry can both bear witness to its chaos and offer the language and form necessary to better understand it.