Met Office Advises Caution
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€16.99
Shortlisted for The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017
Commendation for The Met Office Advises Caution: Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Financial Times Best Books of 2016
GuardianBest Books of 2016
The Poetry School Books of the Year 2016
Rebecca Watts’s debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape, and a fresh take on nature poetry. In assured style, Watts positions herself where Wordsworth, Frost and Hughes have stood; with an original point of view and an openness to the possibilities of form, she retunes the genre for modern ears.
From the wide-open plains of ecology and social history to the intimate enclosures of dreams, homes and bodies, these poems approach their often-unusual subjects with the clarity and matter-of-factness of Simon Armitage and with humour that recalls Stevie Smith, spinning memorable scenes and vivid images from the material of ordinary language.
Animals, as familiars and omens, abound. Weather anticipates and directs human drama, under the analytic and tender watch of a poet influenced as much by science and realism as by Romanticism. As landscaper, orienteer and companion, Watts finds new ways of negotiating the complex territories of our physical and emotional worlds.
Commendation for The Met Office Advises Caution: Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Financial Times Best Books of 2016
GuardianBest Books of 2016
The Poetry School Books of the Year 2016
Rebecca Watts’s debut collection is a witty, warm-hearted guide to the English landscape, and a fresh take on nature poetry. In assured style, Watts positions herself where Wordsworth, Frost and Hughes have stood; with an original point of view and an openness to the possibilities of form, she retunes the genre for modern ears.
From the wide-open plains of ecology and social history to the intimate enclosures of dreams, homes and bodies, these poems approach their often-unusual subjects with the clarity and matter-of-factness of Simon Armitage and with humour that recalls Stevie Smith, spinning memorable scenes and vivid images from the material of ordinary language.
Animals, as familiars and omens, abound. Weather anticipates and directs human drama, under the analytic and tender watch of a poet influenced as much by science and realism as by Romanticism. As landscaper, orienteer and companion, Watts finds new ways of negotiating the complex territories of our physical and emotional worlds.
Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge, where she works in a library and as a freelance writer, editor and tutor. In 2015 a selection of her poetry featured in Carcanet's New Poetries VI anthology. Her debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her second collection, Red Gloves, was published in 2020 and won a Gladstone's Library Writers-in-Residence Award. Rebecca has received fellowships and awards from the Hawthornden Foundation, the Royal Literary Fund, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the Society of Authors and Arts Council England. The Face in the Well (2025) is her latest collection.