Magnetic Field : The Marsden Poems
Hardback £14.99 Faber & Faber
Growing up in Marsden among the hills of West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage has always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window, those ‘private, moonstruck observations’ and the clockwork comings and goings in the village providing rich subject matter for his first poems. Decades on, that window continues to operate as both framework and focal point for the writing, the vastness of the surrounding moors always at his shoulder and forming a constant psychological backdrop, no matter how much time has elapsed and how distant those experiences. Magnetic Field brings together Armitage’s Marsden poems, from his very first pamphlet to new work from a forthcoming collection.
It invites questions about the forging of identity, the precariousness of memory, and our attachment to certain places and the forces they exert.
Magnetic Fields offers personal insight into a preoccupation that shows no signs of fading, and his perspective on a locality he describes as ‘transcendent and transgressive’, a genuinely unique region forming a frontier territory between many different worlds.
The Making of Poetry by Adam Nicolson
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2019
‘This is a book of wonders’ Sunday Times ‘Spellbinding and intelligent’ Financial Times ‘Extraordinary and engrossing’ Spectator
In a book brimming with poetry and nature writing, biography and adventure, Adam Nicolson walks in the footsteps of Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy during the months in the late 1790s they spent together in the Quantock Hills. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner, ‘Kubla Khan’, Lyrical Ballads and ‘Tintern Abbey’; Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood; Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses and paeans to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In short, poetry that sought to remake the world.
William Collins, PB £10.99