Bertha Comes Down by Megan Pattie Hugh Dunkerley ’ – Carol Rumens

’ – Carol Rumens

Certain preoccupations remain constant – an eye for the ways our lives are shaped by loss and an appetite to compensate for that deficit by paying close attention to the world

From this imaginative core

thoughtful but playful

—Iain Brinton

Bertha Comes Down by Megan Pattie Hugh Dunkerley ’ – Carol RumensPublished 28th February 2026. Bertha Comes Down by Megan Pattie is a collection steeped in metamorphosis, haunting, and quiet resistance. Drawing on myth, the gothic, and the occult, Pattie explores the thresholds between madness and recovery, body and landscape, self and spectral other. Her verse is richly imagistic and finely wrought, moving through poems as incantations, narratives of possession, and shapeshifting lyric forms. Whether invoking