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SHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD POETRY PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JERWOOD-ALDEBURGH FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE
Lucky Day begins with natural landscapes through which love and lyric flicker and flare. The sparrows, pigeons and magpies of the urban periphery lighten the atmosphere, edging the collection towards the city in the funny elegy 'Bird List'. The sequence that follows, 'Hand Held', is personal and vulnerable, a finally celebratory exploration of his experience as the father of a child with severe learning difficulties. The collection concludes with poems of love and memory, affirming in the end the luck of survival.
'Richard Price retains an individual voice in which intense feelings of love, or dislocation, are packed into often short, complex lyrics. There is a tension in reading his poems which is created by his care for words, by the integrity of his distillation.' Carol Ann Duffy
'A recurrent theme is relationships of family and sex, where, as in life, what is not said, or half said, is as important as what is actually said, and the gaps, the repetitions, the phrases skating off into silence, the catspaw punctuation are deployed with great skill to keep a reader's mind active in tracing the tingly cataclysmic moves of love and anxiety.' Edwin Morgan
'Richard Price's poetry is in a class of its own.' Poetry Scotland.
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