Laurie Bolger is an award-winning poet, performer and founder of The Creative Writing Breakfast Club. It seems that the poet Laurie Bolger and I have things in common – Irish working-class roots, an interest in writing and thinking about fashion ... and we both found and read grown-up sex books at an impressionable age.
Makeover is a collection of the domestic, the small, the lives of ordinary working-class women, the stories of mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters and friends, all described with film-still precision. Her descriptive language is beautiful. She’s able to conjure up that moment, that childhood in ways that evoke a time and place even if you weren’t there and her pen portraits make me feel as if I know these women:
cursing and coughing
like she emptying great bags of gravel
straight onto the coffee table
Bolger finds beauty in the smallest things, city flowers, the go-faster powers of a frilly swim suit, and the unspoken, when women hold onto lives, make spaces for themselves and challenge society’s expectations of what a good woman is.
This is a confection of a collection – easy to read in one delicious gulp and then return to again and again, always finding a new image, a justifiable blast of anger and defiance. It’s also the only collection I’ve ever read where Sylvanian Families get a name check.
Cathi Rae is in the final year of an M4C funded creative / practice-led PhD. A new pamphlet collection, Just this side of sea-worthy, will be available from Two Pigeons Press in March 2024.
You can read more about Makeover by Laurie Bolger on Creative Writing at Leicester here.
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