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A01=Alison Brackenbury
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War writings
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Product details
- ISBN 9781784101800
- Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2016
- Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Skies is Alison Brackenbury’s ninth Carcanet collection. In these poems, Brackenbury sustains delicate proximities between war and love, joy and sadness, summer and winter. Starting out as the first trees ‘chatter into leaf’, the poems cross through July’s ‘dripping amber’ to January’s ‘false thaw’. The seasonal shift is reflected in the poet’s larder, its variegating hues and tastes: honeycomb, parsnips, apples, broad beans, sprouts, jams and spices summon an air of harvest. But it is also the seasons of life that concern Brackenbury here: the poet’s irrecoverable past, her youth ‘which I can never visit, like a star’, is at the same time the thing that never stops revisiting: in an unexpected letter from an old lover, in a half-remembered playground song. The poems in Skies are attuned to this musicality, to time’s echoes and refrains, the old errors that still ‘flower and flower’. Finally, it is the poet’s quiet conviction to savour life, to take seriously its succulent variety, that defines this collection: the poems attest to the special privileges of age: wisdom, self-sufficiency, a deepening patience with the world; the ability to be, as the poet says of an apple, ‘self-sweet’. The communal warmth of the kitchen finds its double in the exquisite loneliness of rising early, of hearing the barking of town foxes at dawn, or in the contemplation of a garden in autumn, its rows of hips swelled by rain, a rose ‘whose name I think means happiness’.
Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She is descended from generations of skilled farm workers, including a dynasty of prize-winning shepherds. She won a scholarship to Oxford and left with a First in English. She then married and moved to a small town in Gloucestershire, where she combined writing with horse-keeping, parenthood, grassroots politics and a variety of non-academic jobs. For twenty-three years, until retirement, she worked as a manual worker and bookkeeper in her husband’s family metal finishing firm.
She has published nine collections of poetry. The first, Dreams of Power, (Carcanet, 1981) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The most recent, Skies, (Carcanet, 2016) was chosen by ‘The Observer’ as one of its Poetry Books of the Year. Her work has been awarded an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors. For over thirty years, her poems have appeared in Britain’s major poetry journals. She also reviews poetry for a wide range of publications. Her work has frequently been featured on Radios 3 and 4. She has written six full-length radio features, including Singing in the Dark, about the stubborn survival of traditional song, which was a Radio Times Choice. She contributes regularly to Radio 4’s arts programme, Front Row, and has recently read her work live on Radio 4’s Today programme. Alison is noted for her interest in promoting poetry on the internet. She is active on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. New poems not included in her Selected Poems can be found on her website: www.alisonbrackenbury.co.uk
