A Carcanet Event: Moya Cannon, Sasha Dugdale and Olivia McCannon

We are delighted to announce that three Carcanet poets will be launching their collections at Southbank Centre on 1 February. Moya Cannon (author of Hands) will be joined by poets and translators Sasha Dugdale (author of Red House) and Oliva McCannon (author of Exactly My Own Length). To find out more about the event, entitled 'A Book Launch for St Brigid's Day', please click here to go to the booking website.

In Moya Cannon's new collection, Hands, the commonplace is transfigured by an attentiveness that jolts us into wonder.

The poems sing of deep connections: the impulse to ritual and pattern that, across centuries, defines us as human; a web of interdependences that sustain the 'gratuitous beauty' of the planet. Hands travels in time and space, mapping journeys we make as ageing, illness, and the deaths of parents shift our responses to our place in the fabric of the world, where we live in the grace of love and sunlight.

Click here to order a copy with 20% off in Carcanet's January Sale.

In Red House, her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbours, their memories 'jettisoned like old clothes'; and across the chalk Downs of her native Sussex. She traces the shapes that they leave through folk song, lament and lyric poetry.

Haunted by history, confronted by primal brutalities, the poems in Red House proclaim the fierce, bright authenticity that is 'all the proof we need that we're alive'.

Click here to order a copy with 20% off in Carcanet's January Sale.

Olivia McCannon’s first collection explores life on the edge of possibility: in one moment the familiar is blown open, we plunge into the unknown. A chance meeting seals a lifetime; a girl leaps from a window, away from safety – ‘she wanted to see what can happen’. From families improvising a living space in Cairo’s City of the Dead, to a veteran of the Normandy landings coming home to the peaceful reparation of ‘glueing, welding, soldering’, life is luminous, and resolutely seized. The closing sequence follows the last months of the poet’s mother’s life. A journey into grief and loss, it pays tribute to the courage of refusing false comfort, the strength that in the end enables us to live ‘between the lines / of tombs’.

 Click here to order a copy with 20% off in Carcanet's January Sale.

We thought we'd round off with a poem from Olivia McCannon's collection. See you next week!

Nothing I Can Do

There is nothing I can do
I have fiddled with your pillows
Adjusted the angle of the bed
Stroked your head
Held your hand and hoped for a squeeze
Covered you with blankets
Taken them off again
Changed your sheets
Changed your nightie
Tried you with water
Milk tea coffee juice
Dabbed rosewater on your neck
Brushed your hair
Kissed your cheek
Talked to you
Asked you questions questions
Are you in pain
Are you worse
Are you comfortable
Are you okay
I don't know what the answer is
I tidy the pills you've stopped taking
I make a hot-water bottle for your feet
I put on some music
I light a candle
I hold your hand
I weep
There is nothing I can do.

from Exactly My Own Length