Electric Shadow
Regular price
€17.50
Heidi Williamson’s first collection is peopled with vibrant and disturbing shadows. The Northern Lights reach down beneath the London skyline, James Dean learns the craft of distance, Darwin staggers across a heaving ship, Coleridge slumbers on to another dream, and The Travelling Salesman turns a calculator on us. Fuelled by a residency at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, Williamson’s fascination with science leads her to explore less usual territories for poetry, including mathematics, chemistry, and computer programming, as well as space travel, electricity, and evolution. As she investigates the limits of personal and factual knowledge with ‘eyes wide open’, the driving force throughout is a desire to understand the ‘astonishing state of possibilities’ in the world around and inside us. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, it was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize.
Born in Norfolk in 1971, Heidi Williamson has lived in Stirling, Brussels and Salisbury. She now lives in Wymondham, Norfolk. In 2008-09 she was poet-in-residence at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre. She was writer-in-residence at the John Jarrold Printing Museum in Norwich in 2011-14. In 2008 she received an Arts Council award to complete her first collection, Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second collection, The Print Museum (Bloodaxe Books, 2016), won the poetry category of the 2016 East Anglian Book Awards. Her third collection, Return by Minor Road, was published by Bloodaxe in 2020. Her work has been used to inspire poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at festivals.