Boudicca & Co. (Salt Modern Poets Series) [Kindle Edition]

In her unconventional aspect, Boudicca is peculiarly modern, and there are moments in the sequence, where modern wars and conflicts appear to be invading the ancient story. In ‘'Last Stand'', the woods are ‘'thick / with sniper fire'’ and Romans beat the men with ‘'rifle butts''. By breaking with the historic period of the tale, Holland comments on the repetition of atrocities and war, as if Boudicca is looking forward to the suffering and dehumanisation of twentieth-century wars. (Zoë Brigley English Studies )

In the process of dismantling the Boudicca myth, then, Holland has opened up new avenues for the possiblity of an engaged and visceral war poetry written by non-combatants, which evades the pitfalls of much protest poetry – we need only compare Holland's work with the anti-war ‘poetry’ of Harold Pinter to gain some indication of how rich and rewarding her response to modern conflict is – by shifting methods towards the imaginative and narrative elements of poetry, rather than the rhetorical and political. In this sense, the ‘Boudicca’ sequence has a great deal in common with David Harsent's Legion, which represents a similar attempt by a non-combatant poet to engage intelligently with the realities of war. This is, frankly, an outstanding collection, and Holland, as a result, can now count herself amongst the front rank of contemporary British poets. (Simon Turner Gists and Piths )

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 island.” (Clare Pollard )

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. (Maura Dooley )

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 … (Peter Forbes )

Sensual and politically engaged, Boudicca & Co.. drives narrative poetry in new feminist directions. It creates a cast of strong provocative female characters with complex agendas, centred around a controversial sequence of poems in the voice of Boudicca. A collection with a powerful sense of place and purpose.

Jane Holland is an English poet, novelist and critic, born in Essex in 1966. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her first collection, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, was published by Bloodaxe in 1997. A first novel, Kissing the Pink, followed from Sceptre in 1999. Her second collection of poetry Boudicca & Co. was published by Salt in 2006. She lives in Warwickshire with her husband and five children, where she is Warwick Poet Laureate for 2007-08.

Fifth
for Indigo

Three days since the blood failed,
and the test turns blue,
a miniature sea between my hands,
nine months to the far horizon.

This must be a girl again, I'm sick
as a drunk all morning
and the world tilts when I walk
like a ship sliding in a bottle.

Twelve weeks and my waist begins
to thicken. I can't hold
anything down, and the boys
are too heavy to carry upstairs.

I meant to stop at two, then three,
then a fourth appeared.
Perhaps I could try hiding
under the covers, or not washing.

This stubborn foot wedged high
under my diaphragm is
more than a fish by thirty weeks:
it's a rich pearl pushing

against an opalescent shell, a poem,
a number, sonic reality;
refusing to be got rid of, cleaving
like a shadow, part of me.