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The Swerve

Julith Jedamus

The Swerve
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 21st Century, American, British, First Collections, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Oct 2012)
9781847776396
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (80 pages)
(Pub. May 2012)
9781847771346
Out of Stock
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  • Blue fjords
    recede; salmon swim among stalks
    of rye. Bronze bells, or their echoes, break on rocks
    once lapped by the sea. Did you see them, the quartzcarved
    rocks glistening with summer springs?
    The old violence, the old songs:
    from prows and cliffs, men sound their lurhorns.
    from ‘Dommaring’
    Julith Jedamus writes with an intensity that is at once passionate and precise. The poems in The Swerve create unforgettable landscapes: the whorls and spires of juniper in falling snow, Dutch skies of iridescent grey and lilac, the fire-scorched mountains of the American West. They are peopled by dancers and prisoners, sacrificial children and murderous wives; they reshape the imagination. We see the Netherlands in Van Gogh’s colours as he walks and works, breathing the twilight, and the Thames in Whistler’s; Lorca and Euripides are living presences. The timeless dramas of sacrifice and mourning, rescue and betrayal are re-enacted, meanings dissolved and remade. Long-vanished children walk home through the dark, ‘ghosting a path of sparks’.

    Like the scull she rows on the Thames, Julith Jedamus’s poems skim ‘the fine line / between flying and drowning’, ‘unstable as air’, dangerous, alive.
     
    Poet, novelist, editor and translator, Julith Jedamus was born in Boulder, Colorado and has lived in London for the past 19 years. Her first book of poetry, The Swerve, was short-listed for the Michael Murphy Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre prize for best first collection. ... read more
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