The Worrying Rose

Katharine Towers has long been widely acclaimed for the intricate musicality of her poems and for their almost spiritual attentiveness to the natural world. In The Worrying Rose, her fourth collection, Towers invokes the radical act of being still in a world that seems to be dizzyingly out of control. Unfolding from Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs cycle – influenced in turn by the anonymous writings of early Irish scribes and anchorites – The Worrying Rose distils Towers’ thinking about women, creativity and solitude: nuns and female hermits sit alongside the pioneering genius of Ada Lovelace, while the voices of such writers and artists as Nan Shepherd and Maggi Hambling are harnessed to explore the creative state of being alone. Just as the speaker in one of these poems goes ‘into the woods and closes the door’, readers of Katharine Towers’ exquisitely phrased and meditative collection will find themselves in a song-filled, resonant space. 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