21st Century
A01=Owen Lowery
Author_Owen Lowery
British
Car Crash
Category=DCF
Covid
Death
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Life
Poetry
Recovery
Survival
Tetraplegic
Product details
- ISBN 9781800171763
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 28 Oct 2021
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card 2021.
In February 2020, ventilated tetraplegic poet Owen Lowery and his wife, Jayne, were travelling to Scotland when their vehicle aquaplaned, spun round on the motorway, hit a barrier, flipped over the barrier and rolled over several times, before coming to rest on its side in a field. Having barely survived, Lowery emerged into a world transformed by the coronavirus, one in which life and death had moved closer. During his months of recovery from three brain bleeds, a shattered right arm, multiple seizures and pulmonary bleeding, Lowery returned to writing poems, many of which address the strangeness, the disorientation, of his situation and that of the world in general. Lowery wrote these poems amidst reports of Government and health initiatives that suggested potential utilitarian sacrifices of 'the vulnerable'. Completed shortly before his death in May 2021, the fear and loss of the vulnerable and the voiceless haunt many of the poems.
In the 'Crash Wake' sequence, Lowery adopted a twelve-line form. Twelve lines was as long as he could manage to sustain a poem at the time, due to repercussions from his head injury. The form also allowed him to take what Keith Douglas called 'extrospective' snapshots of the new environment in which he found himself: streets empty of people, an Italian village cut off by the army, a train in India killing migrant workers in their sleep. Recovery, nature and love fill the gaps in this changed world. Lowery's final book appreciates afresh landscape and wildlife, family and marriage, the importance and fragility of life.
Owen Lowery was born in 1968. Formerly a British Judo champion, he suffered a spinal injury while competing and is now a tetraplegic. He has a Master's Degree in Creative Writing from The University of Bolton. Owen's first collection, Otherwise Unchanged, was published in 2012 and his second collection, Rego Retold, was published in 2015. He passed away in May 2021.
