£7 plus £3.00 p. and p. ISBN: 978-1-912710-18-8
Raptures and Captures follows on from Muses and Bruises and Ruses and Fuses, both published by Culture Matters. It is inspired by liberation theology and a fascination with the continuing relevance of the lives of the saints to a radical, liberating politics. As one poem’s title states, we are ‘In Need of Saints’.
So Fran Lock sets about re-imagining the lives 0f the saints in modern contexts. Apocryphal juxtapositions are sprung in the shapes of modern-day activists, enduring pop-culture icons like Tony Hancock and Ian Curtis, and the exploited, abused and oppressed amongst us.
Fran Lock’s poems are slip-stitched with punchy tropes and vivid turns of phrase. There are echoes of Sylvia Plath, John Clare and Gerard Manley Hopkins in her uncompromising psychical explorations, self-scouring confessionalism, and vivid, macabre imageries. Suffering, trauma, and spiritual anguish, and the exhaustion, depression and suicidal ideation of working women and men, all overlaying visions of hope and redemption, are continuous themes in her poems.
The images by Steev Burgess which accompany the poems share and express the same dialectical combination of anger and gentleness, strength and vulnerability. As in the other two volumes, the stunning, taboo-busting collages poignantly combine the grime and glitter of modern life in fragmented, uncertain but coherent juxtapositions of images and words, reinforcing, developing and extending the meanings of the poems.
