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Tristram Fane Saunders

  • About
  • Reviews
  • Tristram Fane Saunders lives in London and works as a journalist. He is the author of five pamphlets and one poetry collection, Before We Go Any Further (Carcanet, 2023), and is the editor of Edna St Vincent Millay: Poems and Satires (Carcanet, 2021). His poems have appeared in The TLS, The White Review and Poetry Ireland Review.
    Praise for Tristram Fane Saunders 'erudite and witty, playful and discontented, pessimistic but full of cheer. What sets Saunders apart from many contemporary poets (certainly debutants) is his joy and skill with rhythm and rhyme. His poems are driven by their musicality, though thanks to his careful phrasemaking, they never go off the road... Wide-ranging and gentle with its intellect, this is a charming and inventive first book.'
    Stephen Sexton, Irish Times
     "These poems cut quite a dash! Tristram Fane Saunders is the kind of verse stylist who seems able, whether the lines resound with euphonious music, or clatter with barbed juxtapositions, to fully inhabit the breadth of the English language and its many ways of saying. Before We Go Any Further is a breath of clean, fresh, air."
    Kayo Chingonyi
    'Before We Go Any Further would be a striking debut on the strength of its formal confidence and original phrasemaking alone; but what separates it from the competition is its shamelessly bold return to a poetry of the imagination, to poetry's old tradition of making it new. These poems see it as their business to make connections, shed light and extend their empathies into the world; that they do so with such originality and flair makes for one of the most purely enjoyable and invigorating first collections I've read in a long time.'
    Don Paterson
    'Tristram Fane Saunders is a joyfully idiosyncratic new voice in contemporary poetry; cultured, wry, formally adept, and adroitly musical. But what I love most is the deep compassion beneath the play. Many of these poems seek remedy for their suffering beloveds, only to be openly frustrated by their own limitations. These moments of radical kindness and vulnerability completely floored me, and make this a collection to cherish.'
    Fiona Benson
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