Scarlet Tiger

Scarlet Tiger by Ruth Sharman is the winner of the 2016 Straid Collection Award and was published at the Derwent Poetry Festival on Saturday 5th November.

The Launch event at Toppings Bookshop, Bath on Wednesday 16th November was standing room only.

The London Launch at Keats House on 22nd November was standing room only and the final event in our 2016 Templar Poetry Live readings at Keats House.

Scarlet Tiger is Ruth Sharman’s second collection. Gentler, more elegiac than the first, it balances the forces of dark and light. Celebrating salt marshes, a millennial oak, wild orchids or a meteor shower, the poet explores themes of impermanence and loss, while butterflies and moths become the medium for “talking” to her dying father.

These are intensely moving poems, full of deliberate echoes like notes in a piece of music: the tiger moth of the title flits in and out, jewel-bright, here one moment, gone the next.

“Many people have experienced the wounds Ruth Sharman uncovers…”, wrote Julia Casterton of Birth of the Owl Butterflies, “but few have sung their wounds, vengefully, murderously, in such lovely music, with such a good ear and eye for when to strike the coup de grâce.”