'In Pratibha Castle's sensual, sacramental debut pamphlet, words hum like insects in high summer, tempt the tongue like the last sweet smear of cake batter, and fly like feathers after a lifelong mother-daughter catfight. From lonely childhood Wimpy Bars to lecherous confessionals, Portobello Market in the Swinging Sixties to a garrulous Friday night down the pub in Kells, remote family homes to mourning walks in the South Downs, all the vivid spirit and pain of an Anglo-Irish girlhood coming-of-age is resurrected in these pages and released like petals on the wind. Castle's poems have a heady perfume and courageous way with a secret reminiscent of Edna O'Brien and Medbh McGuckian - and a subtle incantatory magic all their own.' Naomi Foyle 'Pratibha Castle has matched the flow of these poems to the yearning souls they describe. Her light-footed words often slip free in surprising fashion, nimbly breaking the lines and creating unexpected angles onto a fund of timeless material in which souls yearn for release from the grip of bullying belief-systems, and where nature offers its ancient consolations.' David Swann, author of 'The Privilege of Rain' 'How I have enjoyed reading this collection by emerging poet Pratibha Castle as she guides the reader into the liminal spaces that rest between love, loss and the spiritual world... Her use of imagery, language and metaphor both informs and empowers her work. There is a strong elegiac quality to the poems which adds depth and richness, a delightful tapestry of light, shade and gravity. 'A Triptych of Birds and a Few Loose Feathers is a beautiful work of art.' Raine Geoghegan, Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee 'The poems in this collection are full of nature and memory, love and loss. They speak movingly of the hinterland of self, of how we are shaped by people and places - and how, no matter where we go or who we become, the landscape of the past still lies within us. Pratibha Castle sustains a clear, lyrical voice, but is also not afraid to speak directly to the heart. A great debut collection.' Moyra Donaldson From you and her smiling at me as I curl in bed, puzzling why you never smile that way at one another (Riddles) 'A Catholic adolescence infused with abuse and magical thinking...flaunts(ing) sexual awakening in the Mary Quant generation to follow Edna O'Brien...even 'nasturtiums writhe/with promiscuous/lithe ache.' With a language recalling Medbh McGuckian, Castle crosses a South of England Catholic upbringing with a rich, difficult knot of inheritance 'flashed crazy/like a Kildare mare' as she signs the death of her mother with a circling of bird-calls. A superb debut.' Simon Jenner

Excerpt from Stray Feathers From Many Birds: Being Leaves From a Naturalist's Note-Book Twenty years knocking about amongst birds and beasts at home and abroad has furnished me with a great variety of notes concerning their habits, economy, and haunts. I have compiled many of the following articles from my journals, others have been given almost word for word as they were written on the spot, whilst a few are simply extracted from them without any touching up or embellishment whatever. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Bright Feathers, or Some North American Birds of Beauty Bright feathers more faithful in its delineations of bird-forms, and more acceptable in its textual arrangement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Miniskirts in The Waste Land, set in Notting Hill and India, is an elegy for the late 60s/early 70s. In flamboyant contrast to the drab reality of post WW2 Britain, the air in these years of emerging counterculture, the era of the pill, throbbed with the scents and sounds of youth, the blazing hues of psychedelia. These poems portray a young woman's search for self-knowledge, and love. But the heady freedom of the sexual revolution masks a darker side: a fear of loneliness, the realities of the Vietnam war. Along the way, she discovers the joys and disappointments of young love, explores the 'queendom' of motherhood, has a taste of her inner power till, in the end, the 'jangled' voices from her past 'fade' along with 'voices of the jungle'. Peace, however transient, descends upon her. Miniskirts in The Waste Land offers, for the curious, a glimpse into this vanished world. And for those who were there, the tantalising ghost of Patchouli scent and incense. "Pratibha Castle's Waste Land, like that other, read in English class by the pamphlet's convent school-educated speaker, is a multi-faceted landscape of people and place, snapshots of brief connections, lives held taut by fear and loneliness. From the wide-eyed, 'skank of damp' bedsit realities of a young woman adrift in late '60s/early '70s London, to the squalor of an escaped-to India, Castle uses vivid, unforgettable sensory imagery to release from the page a psychedelic blast of protest, betrayal, ''Nam nightmares', fleeting intimacy, loss. Her eye for key details is pin-sharp: in London, unwelcoming women with 'pecking gossip' have 'Princess Margaret scarves / knotted tight as knuckles'; in India, with its rats and 'roaches, beggars' wrists are 'a bangle-clash of need'. But Castle luminously relieves the tense and the tawdry with her deft depiction of tender moments: where lovers 'licked sugar trickles / off each other's chins', and, in Leaven, an exquisite hymn to pregnancy, a woman 'Coaxes loaves / out of their tins / as if from cradles'. This is language, poetry, to reach out and touch, taste, savour." Dawn Gorman "Here is a vivid and sensual poetry of short lines and sharp images that carry the fortunate reader all the way from Portobello Market to Mahatma Gandhi Road in India - 'the air a ferment// of patchouli, rotten apples'. These poems are vividly-drawn snapshots of a time, and mind, and place - and I am very much drawn in." Jean Atkin

Excerpt from Birds of a Feather The ladies had not been so merry. Ma dame Bassinet bitterly bewailed her sauces, which disappointed her fastidious palate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A debut novel already destined to be a book club favorite. “With its deft interweaving of psychological complexity and riveting narrative momentum, with its gorgeous prose and poetic justice, The Gravity of Birds is about sibling rivalry, tragedies, and resurrections. And it’s irresistibly exquisite” (San Francisco Chronicle). Forty-four years after the brilliant young painter, Thomas Bayber, first meets Alice and Natalie Kessler, Bayber unveils a never-before-seen work, Kessler Sisters—a provocative painting depicting the young Thomas, Alice, and Natalie. Bayber asks Dennis Finch, an art history professor, and Stephen Jameson, an eccentric young art authenticator, to sell the painting. But their task becomes more complicated when the artist requires that they first locate Alice and Natalie, who seem to have disappeared. Told in alternating chapters that weave revelations about the sisters’ past with clues Finch and Jameson discover in the present, this story sets three characters on a collision course with their histories, showing how families tear themselves apart and then try to bind themselves together again, not always creating the same fabric. The Gravity of Birds “combines the drama of warring sisters, the mystery of a missing painting, and the sorrow of lost love into a haunting elegy that will…leave you breathless” (Tiffany Baker, author of The Little Giant of Aberdeen County).