Published 2022. Paperback, 464pp, 9 x 6ins, £19.95 / $35
ISBN 9781848618121 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
The second volume of Frances Presley’s Collected Poems,
2004 to 2020 ,
brings together a distinctive body of work, representing a major achievement in modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations. Feminism and political commitment are still evident, but ecology and ecopoetics are foregrounded. It includes Stone Settings and Longstones
which explores Neolithic stones on Exmoor, in collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading; the playful An Alphabet for Alina
, with artist Peterjon Skelt; as well Halse for Hazel
, which received an Arts Council award; and the Ada Lovelace project, Ada Unseen
. There is also a new sequence, Channels,
on shorelines and parallel coasts.
‘Welcome to this comprehensive, collected poems from one of our most impressive contemporary poets. Here we can trace how, from her earliest poems, with their intense and tense engagement with her modernist forbears, Frances Presley has maintained an uncompromising integrity and invention. Her use of the page as a space of experimentation and of language as a multiple-stranded thread of living letters and sounds is dazzling, and these volumes allow us to see the shifts in this practice over decades. Each collection has built on the last, yet remained open to the world as she sees it at the moment of writing, as she greets it with an eye and voice both tender and sardonic. We see this in the wit with which she incorporates diverse found materials into her work and in her engagement with her fellow poets and artists through allusion, conversation and collaboration. In these carefully woven webs, her sense of place and the politics of landscape and her astute feminism remain constant.’ — Harriet Tarlo
‘Presley combines deliberate poetry and environmental engagement to compel us to think and act. She sews together language, time, and space; and shows us that the creative act itself inspires a vivid ecopoetics of the imagination.’—Chad Weidner
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