Over the two decades since his award-winning debut, The Brink, Jacob Polley has earned a reputation as one of the major poetic talents to come out of the north of England. Rooted in the folkloric inheritance of Reiver country – in its rhymes and spells, its work and weather – his poems conduct the electricity of the English lyric tradition into modern vessels and remastered forms. Metamorphosis is central to his perception: with the lightest touch, sunlight becomes honey, children become owls, and loss is alchemised into objects and animals, love songs and cradle songs.
“I’ve tried to enact a kind of intense alertness in my poems,” he writes, “to what it’s like to be alive and conscious and a person that the world pours into through the ears, eyes and heart”. An ideal entry point for new readers, Jacob Polley’s Selected Poems affirms his standing as one of the most gifted poets of his generation.
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