“Sparked by the sudden death of his teenage daughter Iris, Goldsmith’s memoir of grief, loss and regeneration is a celebration not just of her life, but of the living world and all its inhabitants. Wise and beautifully written, it’s an inspiration to anyone with access to a patch of land, however small. And a reminder to anyone who has lost a loved one that the best way to honour their memory is to cherish the planet.” – Liz Jensen
If you compressed the whole of Earth’s history into a single day, the first humans that look like us would appear at less than four seconds to midnight. In the last few seconds, we begin to burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate. The Anthropocene is an artificial geological epoch of our own design – one defined by emergency, with disastrous ecological effects rippling outwards across the entire globe. The illusions of civilisation, progress and choice are crumbling around us, and we are out of time.
Out of Time is curated to include five key thematic sections – sequenced to take readers on a journey through various responses to climate emergency today. These sections include Emergency, Grief, Transformation, Work and Rewilding. The featured poems move through anger, confusion, violence and disarray – spheres of dystopia and decimation – to grief, desperation and lethargy, right through to modes of transformation, fable and utopia as well as rites of passage, activism and work. Finally, we land on tender (if fragile) moments of hope, where humans can be both included or excluded from the picture at will. This powerful, timely anthology engages with the power of poetry to ask questions, subvert expectations and raise reader awareness in 2021 – a year defined by responsibility, accountability and opportunity. Edited, with an insightful introduction, by Kate Simpson and featuring original work from the likes of Caroline Bird, Inua Ellams, Pascale Petit, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Rachael Allen, Raymond Antrobus and Mary Jean Chan.
Hear Kate discuss the anthology, covering themes of justice, inaction and antidotes, and climate change as the ‘narrative to end all narratives’ in this deep-diving interview with Writers Rebel in 2021, following the release of the book.
Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried in its pages – bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers – be touched and held. Where the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.
Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure
of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now.
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.
Read more of our poetry recommendations here.