We're absolutely delighted to announce that four Carcanet poets have been selected for Next Generation Poets 2014!
Yesterday, The Poetry Book Society released their once-in-a-decade list of 20 Next Generation poets who are expected to 'dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade'. The selection shows the best of the emerging poets from the UK and Ireland who published their first collection of poetry within the last 10 years.
Among them, we're very proud to say, are Jane Yeh, Kei Miller, Rebecca Goss and Tara Bergin. The news has been announced by the BBC, in the Guardian, and also in the Telegraph. There was also an interview with fellow Next Generation Poet and Mercury Prize nominee, Kate Tempest, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday morning which you can listen to here (scroll to 01:42:50).
All 20 poets were interviewed for the Poetry Book Society YouTube channel where they also read a sample from their selected collections. Click on the images below for clips of Jane, Kei, Rebecca and Tara.
Here's some more info on each collection....
Jane Yeh - The Ninjas
Funny, heartbreaking, haunting: Jane Yeh's poems open windows onto utterly strange - and eerily familiar - worlds. Lonely ghosts hover around children on their way to school; lilies whisper among themselves, their heads 'filled with pollen and boredom'. Three solemn children in a Van Dyck portrait gaze out into their futures. Moving between high art and pop culture, Yeh creates richly textured poems, their lyrical beauty cut with a dark wit. How do we face death, how survive loss? What does it take to carry on? 'O tempura, O monkeys'.
'The Ninjas is profound, funny and sad, reminding us that humans and androids are lonely and need love, and that attention to detail and kindness to animals can make a better world. This quirky and wise collection has outstanding originality and poise.'
Aingeal Clare, Guardian
Kei Miller - A Light Song of Light
Kei Miller's work was acclaimed by the distinguished Jamaican writer Olive Senior as 'Some of the most exciting poetry I’ve read in years... An extraordinary new voice singing with clarity and grace.' A Light Song of Light sings in the rhythms of ritual and folktale, praise songs and anecdotes, blending lyricism with a cool wit, finding the languages in which poetry can sing in dark times. The book is in two parts: Day Time and Night Time, each exploring the inseparable elements that together make a whole. Behind the daylight world of community lies another, disordered, landscape: stories of ghosts and bandits, a darkness violent and seductive. At the heart of the collection is the Singerman, a member of Jamaica's road gangs in the 1930s, whose job was to sing while the rest of the gang broke stones. He is a presence both mundane and shamanic. Kei Miller’s poems celebrate 'our incredible and abundant lives', facing the darkness and making from it a song of the light.
Rebecca Goss - Her Birth
Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection
In 2007 Rebecca Goss’s newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella’s birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: ‘Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her’.
'It must be at once the most painfully personal and the most restrained and sparsely written poetry collection of the year... It's poetry of witness. The language is simple; the images are simple; the feeling is all. It's feeling no one wants to have, and it is handled with immense grace.'
Katy Evans-Bush, Poetry London
Winner of the 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection
Shortlisted for the 2014 Irish Times Poetry Now Award
The poems in Tara Bergin’s debut collection combine sensuous, supple lyricism with the unsettling familiarity of folklore, fairytale and dream. They are inhabited by characters who seem at first widely different from one another, yet share nervous energy, a troubled state of mind: ‘I am unwell, little crow, / I am unwell and far from home / where longing lives in my house’. In This is Yarrow Bergin gathers language from a wide range of sources and places to create a music and vision entirely her own.
'Bergin succeeds in creating a clear voice and a dramatic situation. This is Yarrow is primarily a book of monologues, establishing voices whose skewed attitudes invite an engaged critical response from the reader. The monologues are sometimes reminiscent of Paul Durcan and at other times Sylvia Plath and they can be very cutting and funny at the expense of their speakers.'
John McAuliffe, Irish Times
Congrats to all four poets!
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off New Poetries V edited by Michael Schmidt and Eleanor Crawforth.
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!