Ruth Sharman is an English poet based in Bath. Her poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, and in national newspapers and magazines.
Scarlet Tiger, winner of the 2016 Straid Collection Award, is Ruth Sharman’s second full length collection of poetry and is published by Templar.
Her first collection, Birth of the Owl Butterflies, was published by Picador, and the title poem won second prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition. The poem also appears on one of the International Baccalaureate’s English exam papers.
Ruth’s poems have featured on Radio 4’s Something Understood, The Song Inside (broadcast along with an interview in January 2015), and in a short film by Jesse Lawrence entitled Borderlands, part of a sequence exploring the theme of special places, and the relationship between place, inspiration and art.
Ruth read Modern Languages at Cambridge and went on to publish a PhD under the title The Cansos and Sirventes of the Troubadour Giraut de Borneil.
She lives with her son and works as a freelance editor and French translator.
Phugtal
Imagine waking to so much sky,
the river reduced
to a thread of light.
Couldn’t wind just knock
this monastery off the mountain,
send it tumbling
like a wasp’s nest
through a thousand feet
of air? Khushal says it’s prayer
that keeps it clinging
to the rock face
despite the pull of gravity.
He says this place
has the power to alter lives
and on these terraces
flush with the drop
all thing seem possible,
even the high path
the guide books warn against,
strewn with scree
and shifting
as the course of marriage.
In Borderlands, a short film by Jesse Lawrence, Ruth Sharman walks to an unassuming Neolithic Long Barrow, on the way revealing the themes that inform her work.