Seasonal Disturbances | Karen McCarthy Woolf
The poems in Seasonal Disturbances explore nature, the city, and the sacred presenting poems that aim to inspire, in the words of the author, an “activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love”. Described as “lyrical and inventive”, McCarthy Woolf’s poems in this collection use classic and contemporary forms, the landay, a sonnet sequence and golden shovels with a disrupted zuihitsu offering a Conversation with Water threaded through the book.
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf is a fellow of The Complete Works — a professional development programme committed to creating more cultural diversity in poetry publishing. She has published three full collections of poetry. Her latest Top Doll (2024) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. Her first collection An Aviary of Small Birds (2014) commemorates a baby son who died in childbirth while Seasonal Disturbances, (2017) is set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence.
Her use of form is playful and inventive yet at the same time deliberate and acts as a vehicle to reflect the strangeness of this time where humanity face an existential threat yet life goes on with its love, loss and arguments despite the climate emergency. An unstable and perilous time in which, “ducklings slip in mud” and teenage asylum seekers in Sangatte “disappear in a flash,” and “An estate agent window shatters/ any hope of securing cheap accommodation.”
