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Leaf Graffiti

Lucy Burnett

Leaf Graffiti by Lucy Burnett
Categories: 21st Century, British, First Collections, Women
Imprint: Northern House
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (72 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2013)
9781847772022
Out of Stock
Digital access available through Exact Editions
  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • like these words
    forever fragments
    uncomplete
    themselves once
    more


    our conversation
    will elide
    sliding meanings
    into silence
    the hang of it


    from ‘Uncompletement’

    Leaf Graffiti, Lucy Burnett’s first collection, is restless, the poems always moving, playfully exploring the interface between words and things, rural and urban, nature and the human world. Fascinated by sequence, repetition and variation, the poet uses words, and the white spaces surrounding them, as raw materials: ‘i lay these words before your mind like bricks / yet tentative’. The music of her work, and the urgency of her themes, propel us towards conclusions that can nonetheless only ever be provisional: ‘if further centres / further into circles / if the weight of the world / is a story cupped in cumulus’. Leaf Graffiti is an innovative and passionate debut collection.
    Lucy Burnett is from south-west Scotland, and in recent years has been based in the north of England. She currently lives in Cockermouth, where she gets out in the fells at every opportunity, and works as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Cumbria. Previously she has worked at ... read more
    Praise for Lucy Burnett 'The writing is distinguished by a tenuousness as if the details are created one by one out of the possibility of their existence, something that has to be coaxed by creating space for it to happen in.'
    Peter Riley, The Fortnighly Review
    'Lucy Burnett's poems involve us in a vivid experience of the self in landscape and language, moving playfully but with an intensity that at times leaves us breathless and amazed.'
    Grevel Lindop
     'There is something of Dylan Thomas in the exuberant wordplay and feeling for place, and something of W.S. Graham in her exploration of language and landscape as the twin territories within which we live... Burnett's subjects are serious ones, but her poems are joyful to read, revelling in the endless possibilities of language and of the world itself, "in whatever colour you might come".'
    Helen Tookey
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