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.
Waking In A Strange Room
It’s as if a dome of glass were perched
above the city, and high up there
the swifts were searching for an exit,
their cries defining the fixity of space –
the way that slab of morning sunlight
on the floor defines the heat outdoors,
while through the window red geraniums
and terracotta roofs are making statements
about density and weight, a metal disc
is communicating with the nearest star
and a linden tree sends waves of scent
through a hundred feet of air;
though hours ago that tree was just a patch
of night, those houses shoeboxes set on end
and furnished by a child, with matchboxes
for tables, cotton reels for chairs.
(from Birth of the Owl Butterflies, Picador, 1997)
.
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.