Untalkative brother, a year dead, everywhere world
is in the ascendant. Out here the air is heavy with rain,
the crowded lobby like a railway station.
Out here, estranged from world, I feel the urgency
to explain exactly what it was that happened to you
and to dig for the whole story...
from ‘The Storm House’

In 2006 Tim Liardet’s brother died in mysterious circumstances. The Storm House is a book-length elegy that is both grief-fugue and exploration of family psychodrama. The two parts of the book form a powerful narrative of sorrow and anger, the events recollected in the first part extended by the virtuoso sonnet-sequence of the second. From uncertainty, trauma and silence, Liardet generates force and gravity in ‘the spring and leap / of energy’ that is the creative life owed to the dead.

Cover painting: Undercut. Copyright © Katarzyna Gajewska. Reproduced by permission of the artist


It is rare for a book of poems to bring an original and deeply poetic talent to a human story as Tim Liardet does in this collection. There is horror in the story he tells, but Liardet takes the horror to its storm-lit root. The Storm House is a book of poems like no other. It is true poetry, sensationally assembled.
Peter Porter

Tim Liardet makes the human macabre dazzle in the dark.
Gwyneth Lewis

Like Slant Rain
Calling Ugolino
The Water-halt
The Constables Call
Grief-fugue
The Gorse Fires
Versions of a Miserabilist
The Jigging Season
The Law of Primogeniture
On Pett Level Beach
Goose Flesh
Jalousie
The Ghost Train
The Revenant
Fantasia on the Snarl
The Beating
‘I thought it was a fucking earthquake,’
The Interlude
Bucko in Love
Exit, Pursued by a Wolf
The Waterlily Garden
Self-portrait as Flypaper
Self-portrait with Patio Flames
Sky Egg
Deleted Scene (The Frog)
The Brothers Grimm
Ur-blue
A Portrait of my Grandfather in Drag
The Peacemaking
The Vintage
Deleted Scene (The Jug)
The Dark Age
‘…Lay Thee Down’
The Storm House