Cows and other poems is a collection of recent poems by Ben Redhead. Ben Redhead is a writer originally from Leeds, who has lived a third of his life in Glasgow, and is now based in Marseille. He has previously had work published by Worms Magazine, Sticky Fingers, and Death of Workers While Building Skyscrapers. Cows and other poems is his debut pamphlet. Erudite poetry emerges from the darkness of dreams. Redhead’s debut is where "letters go blind" —a penumbral precision, a lyric register built like a bothy: austere yet lit with conscience. Sensibility is awake here, embodied in verse both elemental and exact. There are flax-field passions and city cowsheds; a rural roughness meeting a busy sidewalk fag-end. It is poetry that roams the earth as it remembers the mind. — Eleanor Tennyson It takes a particular kind of poet to come up with “someone was handing out relief to all / but it’s blame-poisoned / as soon as you touch it it’s your fault”. And yet reading Ben Redhead’s pamphlet involves the quick realization that you have stumbled upon this illusive- whispered-about-poet. Burden’s tactical aftermath (to touch is to be burdened) are the points of drama in these poems I found myself most moved by; the betrayals of “real real real” so sharp. The reoccurring lexical instabilities, suffused with starving horses and so much love – not just relational love but love for Palestine, love to abolish the police –come together so well in these beautiful, strange little poems. Ah, you think towards the end of the pamphlet, I hear the moan with which the world rebirths itself. — Leo Bussi
