Nine Arches Press

Frieze

Olga Dermott-Bond

ISBN: 978-1-913437-80-0

eISBN: 978-1-913437-81-7

Price: £10.99

Publication date: 5^th October 2023

Format: Paperback / eBook

Cover artwork by Harriet Horton  @harrietdhorton (Instagram) https://harriethorton.com/

Frieze by Olga Dermott-Bond is an astonishing and spellbinding debut poetry collection. Goddesses, saints, dead girls, creatures, mothers, and muses all gather in this collection to confide their secret histories and desires. Voices are recovered from canvas, from behind museum glass, from the pages of literature and the tales of Irish folklore, to explore what can be recaptured and what remains still out of reach.

Here we encounter the women in famous paintings by Marais, Chardin, and Hockney, luminous, reimagined, and speaking for themselves. Artefacts are also animated into life in Dermott-Bond’s darkly magical poems -  a taxidermied mouse, a 17th century axe, even Helen Sharman’s spacesuit where ‘earth-slight and beautiful’ we are ‘turning bright cartwheels in our orbit’. Personal, social and domestic histories are captured and repainted with a precise hand and a gimlet eye for detail. Frieze allows the reader to hear silent, unrequited conversations – framed and unframed –  that explore the ferocious and delicate nature of memory, history, the body.

Praise for Frieze:

‘After reading Frieze I felt illuminated by the light of Olga Dermott-Bond’s language, each poem guiding me to somewhere I hadn’t been before, each line a bridge to the next, each image earning its place with skill and craft. I urge you to immerse yourself in this book, taking your time over each hard-won and gleaming page.’ – Ian McMillan

'In these tender poems, Olga Dermott-Bond conjures a gallery in which we enter every painting, a museum where we slip inside glass cases and come out changed. The detail of the poems pulls us close, but their imagination leaps, deep into heartache, longing, illness, the body and the wild. There’s myth in the everyday and daily work in myth. Dermott-Bond catches it all ‘in amber at our kitchen sink.’ - Miriam Nash

‘In Frieze, Dermott-Bond invites us into an exquisite gallery of wonder. We find ourselves surrounded by everyday fascinations — the ‘pink chandelier’ of a raspberry, the ‘hot throb of fine grease’ — and plunged into stirring accounts of women’s inner lives. The body, too, is strikingly conjured in all its forms, from ‘faces, the shape of devotion’ to ‘an oozing of black hearts.’ Throughout this collection, every voice, gesture, and patch of light is lovingly rendered, and we are left revelling in the language of awe.’ - Natalie Linh Bolderston