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Gallop

Selected Poems

Alison Brackenbury

Cover of Gallop by Alison Brackenbury
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Categories: 21st Century, Bestsellers, British, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (216 pages)
(Pub. Feb 2019)
9781784106959
£12.99 £11.69
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(Pub. Feb 2019)
9781784106966
£10.39 £9.35
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons.

    Her acclaimed early poem, ‘Dreams of Power’, gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on ‘a thrumming lorry’.

    The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.
    Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She is descended from generations of skilled farm workers, including a dynasty of prize-winning shepherds. She won a scholarship to Oxford and left with a First in English. She then married and moved to a small town in Gloucestershire, where she combined writing with horse-keeping, ... read more
     'Brackenbury's range as a poet continues to grow, just as her stanza forms become simpler and more pared-down. A growing engagement with inherited English culture allows her to question unspoken and given assumptions.'
    M.C. Caseley, Agenda
    'Brackenbury conjures a poetry that brings those frightening things into plain daylight, a poetry of the active life, of thrift and graft, of spirits that when pressed resort to sanity.'
    John Bevis
    'Brackenbury makes rhyming seem easy in work that is clever, controlled, eccentric and thoroughly British in both subject matter and tone.'
    David Starkey, Santa Barbara Independent
    Praise for Alison Brackenbury 'In her powerful new collection Alison Brackenbury includes some eloquent farewells, beautifully and formally rendered in her clear and individual voice... Life, danger, risk, sorrow, accident and foreboding are all brought to a pertinent focus here. The poet examines many types of darkness and life’s difficulties in her illuminant language, and her unrivalled ability for unobtrusive but perfect form is ever-present.'
    Penelope Shuttle, ARTEMISpoetry
    'All Brackenbury's renowned qualities remain present in Thorpeness, such as her mastery of the lyric voice, her awareness of form, her ear for a line and her coupling of the natural and human world... Thorpeness invites the reader to reflect on how we face and express emotional truths in linguistic terms... a proper poet like Brackenbury never stops exploring and pushing their own boundaries.'

    Matthew Stewart, Wild Court Poetry
    'So many poems in this book begin with an item or a moment, flooding out to encompass a larger history. It's finely done, and Brackenbury proves again the enduring, treasure-like power of poetry, particularly by her expert pen.'

    Mab Jones, Buzz Mag

    'Thorpeness lays contemporary intonations across the patterns of folk song... Despite relishing past and present flavours, Brackenbury brings home the toughness of agricultural existence, rural poverty and life in service '

    William Wootten, Literary Review 

      'Brackenbury is a poet of strong feeling, deeply involved with her subject matter. That the work is cast with such craft and needs to do so little to draw attention to itself makes it all the more pleasurable.'
    Jonathan Davidson, Poetry Review
    'Alison Brackenbury's ninth collection of poems is a humble, often humorous, celebration of the everyday and the privileges of age.' - Harriet Barker, TLS 'It is her immediate response to the natural world happenings, the seasons, family and memories, and all life's incidentals that make her poems so easy to relate to.' - D. A. Prince, The North 'Filigreed with images of light and dark throughout, it's evocative, amusing and utterly compelling.'
    Frances Lass, Radio Times
    'Glorious'
    Gillian Reynolds, Daily Telegraph
    'Enchants'
    The Times
     'Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet.'
    Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales
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