Poetry
Andrew McMillan (Author)
*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES CULTURE*
After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, McMillan's third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world.
Keeping his trademark breath-space and lower-case lines, but more formally experimental, incorporating sequences and sonnets, the poems in pandemonium explore the fragility and depth of the human mind - in its panic and its troubled retreat - and map this turmoil onto the chaos and abundance of the garden. Depression is mirrored in the invasive, seemingly untreatable knotweed that slowly suffocates the garden, while the sky conspires in its sudden, terrifying clarity, 'as though the root of the world were ripped clean off'.
McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for - and finally finding - some redemption.
Leo Boix (Author)
'It isn't often that one encounters a sensibility so interested in our world - and so compelling in its powers of attentiveness. Leo Boix's poetry has a wide tilt and scope. It sings the doors open' Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
'They are sailors from another century, stalwart / captured on daguerrotype, casually masculine, tender of heart.'
In the middle of the last century, the SS General Pueyrredón from Buenos Aires deposits Leo Boix's paternal grandfather on English soil for the first time. In the two years he spends there, he acquires a taste for his new homeland: from taking his tea white - muy blanco - to plunging into unfamiliar sensual worlds.
So begins the poet's own journey, arriving in the United Kingdom as a young queer man. Ballad of a Happy Immigrant tells of the life he makes there: a dazzling collection of what it means to live, love and write between two cultures and traditions. Effortlessly moving between the English imagination and Spanish language, it is a boundless exploration of otherness and home, and the personal transformation that follows between 'loss / and a life / that starts anew.'
*A Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice*
Seán Hewitt (Author)
** WINNER OF THE LAUREL PRIZE 2021 **
**A SPECTATOR AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES / UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 2021**
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE DALKEY LITERARY EMERGING WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021**
A remarkable first collection by an important new poet
In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual.
Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent.
In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'
Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.
Jay Bernard (Author)
**Winner of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award**
Jay Bernard's extraordinary debut is a fearless exploration of the New Cross Fire of 1981, a house fire at a birthday party in which thirteen young black people were killed.
Dubbed the 'New Cross Massacre', the fire was initially believed to be a racist attack, and the indifference with which the tragedy was met by the state triggered a new era of race relations in Britain.
Tracing a line from New Cross to the 'towers of blood' of the Grenfell fire, this urgent collection speaks with, in and of the voices of the past, brought back by the incantation of dancehall rhythms and the music of Jamaican patois, to form a living presence in the absence of justice.
A ground-breaking work of excavation, memory and activism - both political and personal, witness and documentary - Surge shines a much-needed light on an unacknowledged chapter in British history, one that powerfully resonates in our present moment.
'The verse has anger and political purpose, but a rare lyrical precision, too. The combination is powerful' Sebastian Faulks, Spectator, Books of the Year 2020
*Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry*
*Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award; T.S. Eliot Prize; Forward Prize for Best First Collection; Dylan Thomas Prize; RSL Ondaatje Prize; John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize*
*Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2020*
Andrew McMillan (Author)
**WINNER OF THE POLARI PRIZE 2019**
‘Vivid, accessible and honest, sometimes uncomfortably so’ Alan Bennett, London Review of Books
In these intimate, sometimes painfully frank poems, Andrew McMillan takes us back to childhood and early adolescence to explore the different ways we grow into our sexual selves and our adult identities. Examining our teenage rites of passage: those dilemmas and traumas that shape us – eating disorders, masturbation, loss of virginity – the poet examines how we use bodies, both our own and other people’s, to chart our progress towards selfhood.
McMillan’s award-winning debut collection, physical, was praised for a poetry that was tight and powerful, raw and tender, and playtime expands that narrative frame and widens the gaze. Alongside poems in praise of the naivety of youth, there are those that explore the troubling intersections of violence, masculinity, class and sexuality, always taking the reader with them towards a better understanding of our own physicality. ‘isn’t this what human kind was made for’, McMillan asks in one poem, ‘telling stories learning where the skin/is most in need of touch’. These humane and vital poems are confessions, both in the spiritual and personal sense; they tell us stories that some of us, perhaps, have never found the courage to read before.
Danez Smith (Author)
*WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018*
*A Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry 2017*
*A Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year 2018*
‘[Smith’s] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy’ The New Yorker
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a ground-breaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality – the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood – and an HIV-positive diagnosis.
‘Some of us are killed / in pieces,’ Smith writes, ‘some of us all at once.’ Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes an America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Olivia Gatwood (Author)
‘Yanked every emotion on the spectrum out of me’ JAMIE LOFTUS
In this powerful, candid collection, Olivia Gatwood explores the trials and triumphs of growing up as a woman.
She celebrates the teenage girl and the colour pink while questioning the role that fear and male violence play in who we are and what we become. These piercing poems are at times blistering and riotous, and at times soulful and exuberant.
Balancing singularity of view with a sense of universal experience, Life of the Party is about the pain, the joy, the challenge, the reward of being a girl and a woman in today’s world.
‘Olivia Gatwood is a revolution of woman, a flurry of insight harnessing the language of self-assessment and acceptance’ MAHOGANY L. BROWNE
‘Asks us to remember the stories of those most vulnerable, the women whose stories are too often ignored’ THEM.US
‘An electrifying collection of poems about the agonies and ecstasies of being a young woman’ LEIGH STEIN
Ocean Vuong (Author)
Winner of the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize
‘Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition.’ New Yorker
An extraordinary debut from a young Vietnamese American, Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other.
Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects – love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire – and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: ‘…the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.’ This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.
‘These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.’ Andrew McMillan
Winner of the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection
A Guardian / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
PBS Summer Recommendation
Hera Lindsay Bird (Author)
Hera Lindsay Bird writes sardonically yet with feeling - and occasionally with a tenderness that hits you straight in the heart - about everything from relationships and bisexuality to Nostradamus, art and life. In this, her self-titled debut collection, she gathers many of the poems which have already won her an enthusiastic readership around the world, including the viral hits 'Monica' (about the character from Friends) and the incomparable 'Keats is Dead so Fuck Me from Behind'.
Goofy, absurd and frequently outrageous, this book presents a fresh and original new voice, marrying the energy of the surrealist one-liner to a roving intelligence, a sharp wit, and an instinctive talent for the utterly memorable image and phrase.
