A01=Nancy Gaffield
Author_Nancy Gaffield
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
colonialism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
settler spirit
US history
US poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9781837380299
- Weight: 127g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2026
- Publisher: Shearsman Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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The poems in this collection were written over a 10-year period, beginning with 'Springtime in the Rockies'. This poem was sparked by an incident in 2014 where a bowhunter shot and killed a bull moose in an area where the animals had become habituated to people. The title of the collection is based on the 19th-century ideology, 'Manifest Destiny', the belief that God gave white Americans the right to expand westward across the North American continent. This belief had devastating consequences for the native inhabitants, for the wildlife and for the land. The belief was also deeply patriarchal, equating masculine with conquest, and the land with a wild, feminized space that needed to be subjugated. It is a twisted ideology (hence the inversion of the title) given renewed credence under the current US administration.
Nancy Gaffield is the author of six poetry publications, including Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011), Continental Drift (Shearsman 2014), Meridian (Longbarrow Press 2019), and most recently, Wealden (Longbarrow 2020). She is Reader Emeritus in Creative Writing at the University of Kent.
