![]() Quote of the Day
It is impossible to imagine literary life in Britain without Carcanet.
William Boyd
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
GallopSelected PoemsAlison Brackenbury![]() 10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (216 pages) (Pub. Feb 2019) 9781784106959 £12.99 £11.69 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Feb 2019) 9781784106966 £10.39 £9.35 eBook (Kindle) (Pub. Feb 2019) 9781784106973 £10.39 £9.35 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have, or are prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
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.
'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 '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 |
Share this...
Quick Links
Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years!
Anvil Press Poetry
Aspects of Portugal
Audio Books
Carcanet Classics
Carcanet Fiction
Carcanet Film
Carcanet Poetry
FyfieldBooks
Lintott Press
Little Island Press
Lives and Letters
OxfordPoets
PN Review
Sheep Meadow Press
The Carcanet Blog
New Poetries VIII: Jenny Lewis on Parwana Fayyaz
read more
Angela Leighton: One, Two
read more
Parwana Fayyaz: NPVIII: Meet the Contributor
read more
New Poetries VIII: Sinad Morrissey on Conor Cleary
read more
The Earliest Witnesses: G.C. Waldrep
read more
Conor Cleary: NPVIII: Meet the Contributor
read more
![]() |
![]() We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
This website ©2000-2021 Carcanet Press Ltd
|