The Worrying Rose

Threaded through The Worrying Rose, Katharine Towers’ quiet and meditative fourth collection, are poems referencing Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs cycle, songs for voice and piano which in turn arose from anonymous texts by early Irish scribes and anchorites. These poems distil Towers’ thinking about women, creativity and solitude: there are nuns and female hermits, alongside writers and artists such as Nan Shepherd and Maggi Hambling whose voices are harnessed by Towers in her explorations of the state of being alone. The closing sequence of The Worrying Rose is a poetic interaction with the work and life story of Ada Lovelace – mathematician and writer and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Here are poems about maths, horse-riding, skating, and about Lovelace’s fascination with light, rainbows, and the human nervous system. Amongst these are prose ‘riddles’, addressing the various mysterious illnesses that afflicted Lovelace in her short life. The Worrying Rose exemplifies Katharine Towers’ extraordinary musical intelligence, and attests to an almost spiritual attentiveness to the natural world. ‘Katharine Towers is one of the most original and gifted poets now writing. Her brilliant book is something no other could do, “an outburst of words” so old and English and fresh’ – Conor O’Callaghan