Full Body Reclaim

ISBN: 9781915434258

Format: Pamphlet, 40 pages,

Available (Published: December 2024)

£7.00

Book details

At its heart, Full Body Reclaim is about living fully. There are poems about recovery after trauma and abuse, about gendered power relationships within society and their effect on us, and about parenting, love and loss.
Many of the poems draw on life-affirming qualities found in ordinary experiences and in nature. Often using the animal world as metaphor, a theme of transformation runs through the collection.

About the Author

After working as a counsellor and a trainer for the NHS and others , Caroline Stancer was awarded a Creative Writing MA in 2020 from Nottingham Trent University. Longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2021, commended in Verve Festival’s competition in 2023, and shortlisted for Primers 2023, she has been widely published in magazines. She is studying for a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University and recently completed a novel. Caroline co-runs the poetry collective and podcast, Dandelions Poetry.

1 review for Full Body Reclaim

  1. 5 out of 5

    –

    Review by Elvire Roberts

    Full Body Reclaim takes the reader’s hand and leads them along the path from grim survival to thriving, saying look, here, this is how, look. It explores the damage that men’s cruelty and the rules of our patriarchal society can inflict on girls and women; a person’s resilience and vulnerabilities; the recovery that can be achieved by tapping into an inner, unquenched fire and reconnecting with the natural world.
    The frontispiece poem ‘Shame’ flags up how shame and oppression can be transformed into new ways of living and being. The self faces, indeed revels in, those complex emotions, which are ‘muscled, like a horse’. The horse image reappears in the passion of youthful sex in ‘Slut shaming’, where a girl is forced to choose between safety and authenticity.
    The ‘how’ of recovery is significantly supported by contact with the natural world, a world that does not judge. Caroline Stancer gives deep attention to flowers and animals, turning them in her gaze so that we can see what she sees. She invites us to look again at objects as simple as ‘the split hem of the old coat’ when it catches the light; daffodils that bellow, ‘Yellow! Yellow! […] I am almost all water / and yet look how generous I am / with all I haven’t got’; a joyous poem about a cat with its ‘negative eyebrows’ – playful, self-possessed, utterly secure. She writes from the enigma of the rose with its ‘heart of hearing’, which mirrors back the miracle of the human self.
    She describes the wounds of life, the way that abuse upon abuse can eventually annihilate a girl, the loss of dear friends, but insists that damage is not all a person is: ‘I want to sandwich these stories between beautiful things’. In ‘Gifts’ we are invited to ‘Walk here on the narrow edge of morning’, where scars can be covered ‘with the mess of life going on’, picking ourselves back up through delight in rain, flowers, birds.
    Towards the end of the book, there are prose poems of ‘These endless days’ with the poet’s son in Lockdown times, where there is a real tenderness in wondering together, letting imagination take flight from a single piece of data, reaching across the world to connect with others.
    Although the poems do not shy from the reality of human cruelty and suffering, there is also a strong sense of restoration. The poem ‘Unbound’, which has the limpid quality of a haiku, holds that moment of centred peace:
    From the lowest branch
    of a half drowned tree
    a heron leaps above the flood.
    Feet trail across clouds –
    a sudden absence of sound
    in the breathing wood.

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