Late Gifts
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€18.50
Late Gifts is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this book's occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful relationship in terms that are funny and re-energising, his world renewed. The child's future makes more urgent the environmental and political themes which have long been a concern for the poet.
Here Price has developed new forms for his subject matter, including striking longer pieces which survey contemporary worlds with arresting imagery and a hypnotic energy, the twin gatherings of prose poems 'Shore Gifts' and 'Shore Thefts', and quieter, meditative poems of elegy and awe-struck praise. As Maureen N. McLane has written, 'He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.'
Here Price has developed new forms for his subject matter, including striking longer pieces which survey contemporary worlds with arresting imagery and a hypnotic energy, the twin gatherings of prose poems 'Shore Gifts' and 'Shore Thefts', and quieter, meditative poems of elegy and awe-struck praise. As Maureen N. McLane has written, 'He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.'
Richard Price has published over a dozen books of poetry since his debut in 1993, including Lucky Day (2005), which was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. In 2013 Small World won the Creative Scotland Award for the Best Poetry Collection of that year. It was followed by another Guardian Book of the Year, Moon for Sale (2017). The Owner of the Sea (2021), re-telling Inuit stories, was a Scotsman Book of the Year. In the words of the poet Peter McCarey his poetry 'goes to work on all the major events of our small lives'. Carol Rumens adds: 'Richard Price’s poetry is inventive, sometimes dazzling, but never merely showy. I first came to Price’s poetry with the publication of Lucky Day and every subsequent book has delivered fresh weather. He threads the political into the personal when he writes love poetry, and his intensely felt lyricism is sinewy with warning.' More recent works include Late Gifts, a braided work which ties consumerism's interaction with the environment to a narrative of a middle-aged father and his son. For over thirty years he was a curator and then manager of curators at the British Library, before becoming a freelance writer in 2024. He is a tutor at the Poetry School, London.