Tag Archive for: loss

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Unexhausted Time | Emily Berry

Unexhausted Time inhabits a world of dream and dawn, in which thoughts touch us ‘like soft rain’, and all the elements are brought closer in.

Feelings, messages, symbols, visions… Emily Berry’s latest collection takes shape in the half-light between the real and the imagined, where everything is lost and yet ‘nothing goes away’. Here life’s innumerable impressions, moods, seasons and déjà vus collect and disarrange themselves, while a glowing, companionable ‘I’ travels the mind’s landscapes in hope of refuge and transformation amid these displaced moments in time. Whether one reads Unexhausted Time as a long poem to step into or a series of titled and untitled fragments to pick up and cherish, the work is healing and inspiring, always asking how we might harness the power of naming without losing life’s ‘magic unknownness’. By offering these intangible encounters, Emily Berry more truly presents ‘what being alive is’.

‘Emily Berry has a refreshingly free, not to say incendiary, approach to poetry.’ ~ Observer

The Devil’s Highway | Gregory Norminton

The Devil’s Highway is the folk name for a Roman road in north Surrey. The name is rooted in superstition, for in the Dark Ages, it must have seemed that only the devil could build anything so straight and strong. The Roman road marks the beginning of written history, of a civilisation that destroys in the name of progress. Physically and metaphorically, the Devil’s Highway runs through the interlinked narratives that make up the novel.

Set in the unforgiving sandy ‘wastes’ of Bagshot Heath, the three sections of The Devil’s Highway consist of three agons, or battles, against our self-destructive nature. In ‘Blueface’, an ancient British boy discovers a terrorist plot in which his own family is implicated. In ‘No Man’s Land’, two twenty-first century people – one traumatised by war, another by divorce – clash over the use and meaning of a landscape. Finally, in the futuristic ‘The Heave’ (where language is as degraded as the planet), a gang of feral children struggles to reach safety in a time of war.

Three narratives, one location, combine in a novel that spans centuries and challenges our dearest assumptions about civilisation. Combining elements of historical and speculative fiction with the narrative drive of pure thriller, The Devil’s Highway is an epic tale of love, loss, fanaticism, heroism and sacrifice.

“A brilliant deep-time meditation on how landscapes hold – and conceal – meanings.”~ Robert Macfarlane

“The best treatment of climate change in fiction I’ve come across. A powerful, essential novel.” ~ George Monbiot

 

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Tongues of Fire | Seán Hewitt

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.