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.
Scarlet Tiger
We’d have killed it
if we’d had the courage –
to crush a body this
bloated or stamp on wings
like shrivelled walnuts.
Was it a mutant? Too slow
to break free and make
for the open?
It scuttled out of the leaves
and frass, climbed
our stick and hung there.
Like a zippered bag crammed
with too many t-shirts.
Stayed put for hours,
just shifting its footing
now and then.
We moved it on to flowers later,
offering cow parsley,
apple blossom, anything
to encourage it to feed,
then in desperation sugared water,
which left sticky pools
on the table top darkened
with wing powder.
The moth didn’t budge.
For hours it clung to the same
flower head, rearranging
itself, pumping fluids
from one body part to another,
growing streamlined,
its wings slicked over its back
and as bright as if
such colours never existed
till now: this camel
and cream, the black
that in this light, at this angle,
was more a dusky green
lustred with gold –
or was it amber? – the hint
of scarlet underwing
inset like a gusset
that flashed suddenly
into prominence
as the Scarlet Tiger took off
from our jam jar of flowers
on the garden table, circled twice,
landed in the lilac tree,
then made its bid for the sky.
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.