Pond

“Sarah Westcott’s Pond is a mesmeric meditation on our most local ecology: the back garden. It worries at the surface and plumbs the depths: of language, of intuited knowledge, of matter and what it is to speak. This is nature poetry of the first order: full of music, beauty and metaphysical wonder; precise in its imagination and lyric flight.”

⎯ Karen McCarthy Woolf

“The poems in this pamphlet create a water-human world of intersections. Light, surface-skimming poems touch the page like mayfly touch the meniscus. To read Pond is to spend time in an alternative, delightful, curious universe.”

— Jane Burn

“Pond is a generous and compelling inquiry. Here are poems steeped in close observation and empathy, played to a wild and inquisitive music – a deep pleasure to read. Sarah Westcott’s voice is intimate and witty, permeable enough to include water’s own borrowed inklings, pushing playfully against the limits of what it’s possible to know and to say of ecological habitats always on the move.”

— Linda France

“A book of tender depths”

— Alison Brackenbury

“This beautifully produced pamphlet from the Braag by Sarah Westcott is full of "wet and complicated" wisdom. Water and words are called into being as the poet builds a pond and "this pond became a page". Westcott's poetry "pulses at the seams" of language, at the very edges of thought, bristling with thrilling newness, "submissive and haired". The pond itself is "full of mind" and we cannot help but pause, ponder and dip our toes into this immersive pool of thought” — Poetry Book Society Summer Bulletin 2024.