BOUDICCA & CO. is the title of Jane Holland's second collection of poetry, published October 2006 by Salt Publishing. You can buy this book online by clicking below BOUDICCA & CO: http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1844712893.htm * Praise for Jane Holland's BOUDICCA & CO: 'Extremely powerful and varied ... Holland has both the clarity for the reader and the mastery of language to say what she means in a way that makes the brain tingle with both shock and pleasure ... This collection is outstanding.' Angela Topping, Stride Magazine, April 2007 * UNPUBLISHED ENDORSEMENTS FOR "BOUDICCA & CO" "From versions of Anglo-Saxon to the unabashed lyric of pastoral, by way of the dragon women and velvet-palmed men of a new fairy-tale, Jane Holland’s Boudicca & Co is a book of adventurous, resonant inventions. As the title suggests, it offers a new view from the interior—of both country and psyche—in which history and geography are co-opted in effortless interplay. It’s a work of synthesis, and of poetic and emotional maturity, in which Holland emerges as a true craftswoman, a supple and graceful thinker with an effortless grasp of line, at the heart of the English lyric tradition." Fiona Sampson "Boudicca & Co. is a bold re-imagining of Britishness. Our contemporary England of Sunday roasts and cyberspace gives way to a wild and alien landscape, a place that Holland lays glinting before us "like a coin tossed in the sun / blunt-edged, foreign." Steeped in myth and medieval poetry, this is a land of "ruins under rain," hares, oaks, gargoyles and the Green Man. At the heart of it, embodying both Britain's fierce beauty and its bloodied past, is Boudicca, and her voice is a startling achievement: modern, pitch-black, funny, and yet hauntingly lyrical. Jane Holland’s second collection is full of love and astonishment, a tribute to the resilience of women, to the power of literature, and, most of all, to: 'England // my beleaguered sunken isle.' " Clare Pollard " '—the grip/ of the wheel, a licence to roam.' Jane Holland’s poetry smoulders and blazes. Take your deepest breath, and go with her." Alison Brackenbury "Jane Holland modernises myths and mythic characters, and so achieves a kind of resonant timelessness in poem after poem." Brendan Kennelly * "BOUDICCA & CO." Jane Holland’s second collection, Boudicca & Co., is a provocative and vibrant exploration of women and their roles in society. The perennial themes of motherhood, love and sex jostle for space here with elegies, poetry written for performance, and Celtic-inspired mythological pieces. Richly allusive, these poems create networks between each other, tell stories, make music and ask unexpected questions of the reader. A collection with a powerful sense of place, Boudicca & Co. is located mainly within the British Isles, though not always in the present day. Often retrospective in mood, these poems deal with the poet’s own difficult past and with historical Britain, reinventing Celtic and Medieval stories and myths in particular. Yet there is also a Britain here that never existed, a landscape of the imagination, where a restless questioning spirituality tries to make sense of the gaps between expectation and reality. Sensual and politically engaged, Boudicca & Co. drives narrative poetry in new feminist directions, creating a host of female characters with strong individual voices and complex agendas. The title poem is a long ambitious sequence in the voice of Boudicca, disenfranchised Queen of the Iceni who leads the Ancient Britons in rebellion against the Roman settlers. It follows Boudicca’s transition from wife and mother to warrior queen, prepared to kill in the pursuit of freedom, blindly ruthless in her desire for revenge. The sequence explores the themes of national identity, personal betrayal and civil war with dark anarchic humour and an uncompromising starkness not for the faint-hearted. Jane Holland's first collection THE BRIEF HISTORY OF A DISREPUTABLE WOMAN was published by Bloodaxe Books (1997). PRAISE FOR 'BRIEF HISTORY OF A DISREPUTABLE WOMAN' MAURA DOOLEY 'Jane Holland discovered, more or less by chance, a passion and a talent for snooker. She entered a man's world where the battle to overcome bigoted rules and attitudes was as great as the battle to perfect her own skills in the field. She has turned her formidable energies and skills to poetry now with similarly turbulent and successful results.' BRENDAN KENNELLY 'The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman is the book of a shrewd, sensitive, pained and perceptive outsider, who is uncertain enough of her outsider status to explore the strengths, wiles, stratagems and prejudices of those who constitute the 'insiders' world'. Jane Holland uses language both as a weapon and as a shield. This is an intelligent book, knife-sharp at moments, tender and gentle at others.' PETER FORBES in POETRY REVIEW 'Jane Holland's route into poetry was the unusual one of snooker, in which she was briefly a professional ... Snooker is actually a good metaphor for poetry: angling off the cush is like setting up a rhyme scheme, full rhymes give off a satisfying clack ... Besides snooker, she writes well of the eternal verities: 'The Newel Post' is a pivot around which life turns: 'I recognise her by her changing tread. / I am that point along the passageway / where flesh and spirit tremble into wood' IAN McMILLAN in POETRY REVIEW 'Jane Holland doesn't mince words, and sets her stall out straightaway in the first poem in this book, the manifesto-ish 'Pulse': 'I am not a woman poet. / I am a woman and a poet. / The difference is in the eyes.' What makes Jane Holland such an exciting prospect for poetry is that she hasn't arrived by the usual route; instead of hours in libraries and years polishing her sonnets, she's spent hours in snooker halls and years polishing the end of her cue with a cube of chalk ... Elsewhere, Holland explores relationships, being a mother, being a lover, and simply being alive in a complex world. They're not new subjects, of course, but what marks out these poems is what marks out the good snooker player: concentration and placing. The concentration shows in the way that Holland can make a poem that is about One Thing carry on being about One Thing all the way through. I often find that poems which are meant to be about War, or Love, or a bus stop, suddenly lurch into being about something else and the poet often thinks this is clever but it isn't: it shows a lack of concentration. Holland looks straight down the cue and the hall falls silent, and a poem like 'Post Sirenists' is the result, a poem about people who have survived some kind of holocaust: 'We're coming out like moles / at the end of a dark tunnel, // edging, noses to the light, / whiskers flaring ... ' The placing is to do with line endings, stanza breaks, the things I find myself banging on about (to myself and others) over and over again. Holland is good at line endings ... I cited a piece in The Guardian about one of our matches in which the writer said that Barnsley striker John Hendrie was in front of everyone else on the pitch in action and thought, and it's that being ahead of everyone else that makes for good poetry: it's the ability to see where all the moves might lead, where all the possibilities might end up, even to see all the imponderables and make them much less imponderable. That's the kind of poet Jane Holland is, a superb thinker-ahead, a person who always knows where the poem is going to go, even before the poem has been written; and that's not in any reductive way, that's in a way that makes you raise your fist and go YESSSS!'