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Bethany W Pope was born in North Carolina. She has lived in five countries and six American states; never settling anywhere for more than five years at a time. When she was twelve, her parents sent her away to live in an orphanage in South Carolina during which time she worked as a midwife for cattle. Later, she dropped out of highschool to work for a veterinarian. She has performed more than a few illicit surgeries. She earned her MA in Creative Writing from Trinity, St David's and her PhD from Aberystwyth University.
Bethany has won a great many literary awards including The Luigi Bonomi Award. She was was a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards, the Cinnamon Press Novel competition, and the Ink, Sweat and Tears poetry commission. She was nominated for the 2015 Pushcart Prize, and she’s been nominated again for 2016. She won the Bookends Bookshop Haiku Competition and was a finalist for The Divine Comedy Poetry Contest in conjunction with the National Museum of African Art and the Smithsonian Institution.
Her previous poetry collections are: A Radiance (Cultured Llama, 2012) Crown of Thorns, (Oneiros Books, 2013), The Gospel of Flies (Writing Knights Press 2014), and Undisturbed Circles (Lapwing, 2014). Her first novel, Masque, is due from Seren in 2016.
Poetry
138 x 216mm
70 pages
£8.99 + P&P UK
PUB: 22 APRIL 2016
ORDER HERE
The Rag and Boneyard is a retelling of the Persephone myth, set in jazz-age Tampa.
In this book, bootleggers rub elbows with Gods in the moss-hanging wastes of the Florida swamps.
*****
"The Rag and Boneyard: Bethany W. Pope's variation on the Persephone myth, set in the swamps of Florida during Prohibition. One of the most reworked of myths, perhaps because Persephone's situation, between a mother and a lover who both want to own her, is so timeless. This version, for all its Gothic darkness, fizzes with upbeat energy: Demeter kneading loaves like body parts, facing the dogs of death with her shears; Persephone adapting, confronting, a born survivor. The vision is startlingly sharp and original, the language clinging to mind and memory like the Spanish moss of death's swamp."
"The Rag and Boneyard will wrap its fingers round your wrist and lead you into a gothic underworld in which Pluton is costumed in dark silk suit, owns a gun, and a car with tinted windows. And you will be compelled to follow, a hungry curiosity will draw you like Persephone from room to room of his vellum-walled house.
Canto 1
White-haired Jove sits
sipping an illegal mint julep,
watching flecks of dead plants
rise and fall in the glass.
Plouton, his brother-in-business,
reclines deep in his wicker-backed throne.
His dogs circle round him;
three large, sharp-toothed Alsatians
that pant in this heat with murderous thirst.
The king of the swamp lets dangle his hand
to be kissed by those tongues, livid and steaming.
‘I thought we had come
to some measured agreement.
The trading rights, all of Tampa,
in exchange for your girl.’
Jove tinkles rare cubed ice
in his glass, contemplating
finances, weighing their promise
against the wrath of his wife.
‘My friend, you’ve got to think.’
Plouton tracks the brown-streaked
path of a hare with his eyes,
watching the lithe form bound
across the watery soil.
‘Every hotel, every speak,
stocked by my product,
and every dealer reporting
to you. I’ve got thirty tables
of New Orleans finest,
ready to go, awaiting your word,
awaiting your daughter.
I need you to bind us.’
The sun tries hard,
but cannot reach them,
shaded as they are by live oak,
by stalactite mosses.
Jove swallows a cold stone,
nods his white head.
‘We have a deal. It’s your job to keep it.’
Dark Plouton rises, his weight
creaking the strong boards of the veranda,
his mansion mountain-like behind him.
A wave of his hand sends forth his dogs.
‘Go Tartarus, go Hades, atta boy Dis!
Go get that fucker!’ He turns to his friend,
soon to be in-law ‘You’ve got to see this.’
The lupine bodies flash
across the almost-liquid marsh,
their hooked claws raising pellets of mud.
Hades catches the fleet body of the hare
within fifty paces, shattering its grace
with a crack of his jaw.
When it falls into his master’s hand
its wide eyes are still glazing.
‘Good boys, all of you.’
Before the body has time to cool,
much less stiffen, Plouton the giant,
the titan, whips a sliver-edged knife
from his boot and slices the fleet hare in twain.
The intestines pool in hot coils
on the pine boards, a pink and white
pile that steams in the air.
He prods the liquid jewels with his knife-point,
seeking out runes.
Smiling at nothing, the mystery his.
CONTINUED...
Canto 1 continued...
‘The Greeks knew a thing or two,
my friend. Not those fools there now,
the ones fighting the Turks.
They squabble like we do. The ancients.
They knew our futures were scribed
on our guts. I’ve got yours here.’
‘What do you see, Plouton?’
Jove drains his courage
from cool, minted bourbon.
‘Riches. Sex. Madness. Death.’
He grins at his partner,
‘The usual stuff.’ Plouton pours
from the pitcher, his water of life.
‘Let’s drink. To this,
to us: royal splendour.’
His dogs, three, all large
and half-wild, lap up the blood,
the proof of the pain,
tonguing dead eyes
and the board patched with fur
