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Exactly My Own Length

Olivia McCannon

Exactly My Own Length by Olivia McCannon
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 21st Century, First Collections, Women
Imprint: OxfordPoets
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Oct 2012)
9781847777003
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (64 pages)
(Pub. Nov 2011)
9781906188047
Out of Stock
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Contents
  • Awards
  • Winner of the 2012 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collections Prize

    Olivia McCannon’s first collection explores life on the edge of possibility: in one moment the familiar is blown open, we plunge into the unknown. A chance meeting seals a lifetime; a girl leaps from a window, away from safety – ‘she wanted to see what can happen’. From families improvising a living space in Cairo’s City of the Dead, to a veteran of the Normandy landings coming home to the peaceful reparation of ‘glueing, welding, soldering’, life is luminous, and resolutely seized. The closing sequence follows the last months of the poet’s mother’s life. A journey into grief and loss, it pays tribute to the courage of refusing false comfort, the strength that in the end enables us to live ‘between the lines / of tombs’.
    Liverpool Echo
    City of the Dead
    Dust
    Mirror
    Map
    Cohabitation
    Paper Tiger
    Jubilee Portraits
    No. 3
    Probability
    Argyle Street, 1983
    Barometer
    Unborn
    Light-Stone
    The Offer
    Ironing
    Map of the Moor
    Hope Street, 1966
    Retirement
    Month of Herons
    Exactly My Own Length
    Book of Hours
    Laughter
    Sick World
    At the Door
    Honouring the Dead
    You Said This
    The Weight of Life
    The Lovelace Place
    No More Fields
    Stewed Fruit
    A Request to the Cranes
    Landing Light
    Vigil
    What To Do With a Baby
    Fragile Domain
    Conversation
    Nothing I Can Do
    All Souls’ Day
    Memorial
    Last and First
    Olivia McCannon was born on Merseyside and lives in Harlesden, London. Her collection Exactly My Own Length (Carcanet/Oxford Poets, 2011) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and won the 2012 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. She lived for nine years in France – eight years in Belleville, Paris – ... read more
    Awards won by Olivia McCannon Winner, 2012 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collections Prize
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