Flat lay of 12 poetry books against a bright red background

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Reading lists

12 poetry collections to help you understand the world

Foretokens

Unearthed in a clear-out, a picture calendar she’s kept 
– hoarding, I’ve learnt, is a mark of the emigrant – 
across continents and time. 
 
So begins Sarah Howe’s extraordinary new collection, returning to the riddle of belonging she explored in her award-winning debut, Loop of Jade. At the heart is her own mother’s clouded past: abandoned as a baby and taken in, at the turbulent dawn of Communist China, by a woman with her own hidden motives. Now a mother herself, Howe finds herself re-examining this unreliable narrative with fresh sight. Sifting through her own history, the poet asks, how can a new generation transform a shattered inheritance? And what is lost and gained in the pursuit? 
 
What unfolds is a personal Babel of voices and identities, and an examination of the contradictory legacies of colonialism, where poems – past and present – act as ‘foretokens’, omens of what lies ahead. A central spine of poems takes the molecular structure of DNA as its template: a ‘ladder of atoms beginning to twist’, down which the poet steps into the darkness of time. Objects of witness resurface to tell their own stories: fragile porcelains of past centuries transiting across continents; a picture calendar of old postcards from another world. 
 
‘From the other side of ruin / we found safe passage’, Howe writes in these spectacular poems of emotional heft and quickening wit, their voice salvaged from the fragments of a former self. Foretokens is a monumental work of survival and creation, turning over what is left behind as it strikes out towards astonishing new vistas.

Sarah Howe

One of the very best books of poems I have read for a long time -- complicated and moving and very accomplished.

Thoughtful, agile, erudite... [Howe] has a knack for sound and rhyme so delicious you want to say the lines aloud just to feel your tongue around them. And sprinkled throughout are minute observations that make the everyday seem magic. After reading Loop of Jade, the world seems larger and more nuanced than ever before, one of the most wonderful experiences I’ve had reading a contemporary poetry collection. Howe more than holds her own among the heavyweights in a memorable year for new poetry, a year in which poets took our accepted ideas of race, heritage and tradition and blew them wide open.

Absolutely amazing... Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade shone with its startling exploration of gender and injustice through place and identity, its erudition, and powerful imagery as well as her daring experiment with form. She brings new possibilities to British poetry.

Pascale Petit, chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize judges

Mature and accomplished... Loop of Jade is one of the best first collections I've read in recent years

Rich and fierce, Sarah Howe’s poems are alive to the complex stories and voices that cohere around objects, family and place. This is a magnificent collection, surprising and moving in equal measure – I loved it.

A wonderful first collection – it isn’t often you can say exquisite, original, erudite and adventurous all in one breath. Sarah Howe goes to the very heart of her own, her mother’s and China’s recent past.

Sarah Howe's soulful poems are as vivid as a river flowing through the Chinese landscape, as alive as mothers calling to their children.

Xinran, author of The Good Women of China

A glittering debut exploring dual British and Chinese heritage with beauty and wit

The poems in Loop of Jade…move me in profound and previously unimaginable ways

[A] sinuous, shimmering, mirage-like debut collection

The poems literally glisten… The evocative and unique poems are a joy.

[Howe] shows that new voices can still carry their own unique freight of subtle music married to acute intelligence..

[An] exquisite first collection… With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love… An unmistakable new voice in British poetry.

*WINNER OF THE T. S. ELIOT PRIZE 2015* 
*WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES / PETERS FRASER + DUNLOP YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015* 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2015* 
 
There is a Chinese proverb that says: ‘It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.’ But geese, like daughters, know the obligation to return home. In her exquisite first collection, Sarah Howe explores a dual heritage, journeying back to Hong Kong in search of her roots. 
 
With extraordinary range and power, the poems build into a meditation on hybridity, intermarriage and love – what meaning we find in the world, in art, and in each other. Crossing the bounds of time, race and language, this is an enthralling exploration of self and place, of migration and inheritance, and introduces an unmistakable new voice in British poetry.

Sarah Howe

Praise for Loop of Jade

One of the very best books of poems I have read for a long time -- complicated and moving and very accomplished.

Thoughtful, agile, erudite... [Howe] has a knack for sound and rhyme so delicious you want to say the lines aloud just to feel your tongue around them. And sprinkled throughout are minute observations that ma ...

Absolutely amazing... Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade shone with its startling exploration of gender and injustice through place and identity, its erudition, and powerful imagery as well as her daring experiment wi ...

One of the very best books of poems I have read for a long time -- complicated and moving and very accomplished.

Thoughtful, agile, erudite... [Howe] has a knack for sound and rhyme so delicious you want to say the lines aloud just to feel your tongue around them. And sprinkled throughout are minute observations that ma ...

Absolutely amazing... Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade shone with its startling exploration of gender and injustice through place and identity, its erudition, and powerful imagery as well as her daring experiment wi ...

One of the very best books of poems I have read for a long time -- complicated and moving and very accomplished.

Thoughtful, agile, erudite... [Howe] has a knack for sound and rhyme so delicious you want to say the lines aloud just to feel your tongue around them. And sprinkled throughout are minute observations that ma ...

Absolutely amazing... Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade shone with its startling exploration of gender and injustice through place and identity, its erudition, and powerful imagery as well as her daring experiment wi ...

Books by Sarah Howe

Articles featuring Sarah Howe

12 poetry collections to help you understand the world

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