Tales of Boy Nancy
Roll up! Roll up! Behold a water-drenched tale of marvellous creatures, transgender sailors, sex-changing fish and doomed seals... Tales of Boy,Nancy tells the stories of those born in-between - voiced by a Sailor. the Girl who loves him, and an omnipresent Showman/ narrator.
‘The ground shifts under the reader in an unusual and intriguing way, and there are moments of great tenderness…It is almost impossible to create a poem that smells right. Read ‘Cardamom’. Cath Nichols can do it.’
Helena Nelson, Happenstance
‘A moving account of hidden lives, both honest and sensitive’
Deryn Rees-Jones
‘full of lovely detail… these poems give pleasure.’
Nessa O’Mahony, Orbis
‘These poems smell of the sea, of ropes and swilled decks, and yet they subvert our sense of what is normal, disrupt some of the orthodoxies... Ambivalence - as it is in life itself - is at the heart of Nichols’ poems; the tone is both robust and elegiac.’
Matt Simpson
‘The uncertainty voiced… is beautiful and delicately handled. How many of us would dare to ask such relevant questions? ... Nichols does indeed speak in tongues.’
Maureen Almond
[one of Liverpool’s] ‘up and coming poets’ The Independent
Part of this sequence was performed live during Radio Four's Ear Candy initiative in 2004.