Flamingo Pamphlet

Kathryn Bevis's Flamingo introduces us to a troupe of wild, unique, and captivating poems.

Here, Bevis treats a range of subjects including work, survival, love, and mortality.

Flamingo brings us into encounter with life and our own embodiment: our births and deaths, our struggles and joys, doing so with humour, dynamism, and spirit.

Formally inventive, using forms from the ghazal to the gram of &s, all the poems take startling and original angles on their subject matter.

There is humour and biting wit undercutting the sexual politics in 'Wonder Woman Questions Her Status as a 70s Symbol of Female Empowerment.' There are surprising metaphors and surreal narratives that uncover difficult truths and painful experiences, as in 'Teddy' in which a teddy bear stands in for an abusive partner.

There are moving poems, too, about romantic love and family.

Bevis is never afraid to explore complicated feelings for loved ones: for example in 'Knitting Nan-Nan,' in which the poem's speaker knits her grandmother back to life.

Often, animals are companions on the journeys that these poems make.

Starlings speak in a collective flock to remind us that individualism is not the rule for all creatures.

A squid trapped in a fridge echoes the collective lockdown of '2020', and the grieving rituals of animals illuminate a human separation.

Cancer is posed as a ring-tailed lemur, capering through the sufferer's body, and the titular 'Flamingo' imagines death as a flamboyant transformation where the speaker shapeshifts into the afterlife by becoming a flamingo herself.

Altogether, Flamingo is worth reading for its remarkable originality.

Every poem in this book is a discovery and a joy.