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ThorpenessAlison Brackenbury
Categories: 21st Century, British, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (104 pages) (Pub. Feb 2022) 9781800172258 £12.99 £11.69 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Feb 2022) 9781800172265 £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 and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
There is something richly circumstantial about Alison Brackenbury's poems: they are often rooted in a rural world, or in townscapes which sustain communities and preserve a strong sense of their history and what it gives them.
Thorpeness has delicious surprises, among them 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding', a rewarding culinary experience based on a black-covered handwritten notebook of recipes from Dorothy Eliza Barnes, 'Dot', the poet's grandmother. 'When I knew Dot, she was a Lincolnshire shepherd's wife. But, as a young woman, she had been an Edwardian professional cook,' the poet explains, making her notebook a resource for the contemporary reader. The world of nature – birds, plants, weathers – comes alive in poem after poem, but there are also important poems of nurture. Brackenbury belongs in a long line of rural and provincial poets who bring England alive in forms and rhythms of renewal. She is a familiar radio voice, performing her won poems and narrating programmes she has scripted.
'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 Praise for Alison Brackenbury '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 '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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