Happy Christmas everyone! My first little collection is published by Salt Publishing and is now available; click here to see the description, endorsements etc. You can buy it from the Salt website, or from Amazon and Waterstone’s etc. online.
Just want to say thanks here to all my friends and family who have supported my writing, and me(!). Those not explicitly thanked in the book definitely include: Jonty Tiplady, Jessica Pujol, Richard Parker, CA Conrad, Sarah Dowling, Peter Jaeger, Nina Power, Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, John Wilkinson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Elizabeth Guthrie, Sonia Lyon, Kelly Bird, Joe Reay, Eloise King, Lee Smith, and Chris & Jen Hamilton-Emery. THANK YOU SO MUCH & HAPPY NEW YEAR!
The cover looks like this:
“With ‘a dewy idea peaking at what / Is this vector I caress? / What ran my legs brushing / alongside the linotype’, a deceptive and light-footed vulnerability unexpectedly folds in on itself to throw up the most serious questions; then resolutely refuses to ‘make sense’ of things. Erec & Enide is a bold and unashamedly intimate work that delights in the theatrical, communicative powers of language, and by turns gives way to a quiet sadness. Writing out of contemporary feminist revisions of lyric and epic forms, the poems set up an overtly feminised display which the reader then re-enacts to find meanings which do not ally and a feminism which does not conform to conventional modes of uplift. Taking its title from Chretien De Troyes’ twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Erec & Enide draws on Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail, the pastoral romanticism of John Clare, the feminist projects of Lisa Robertson and the essays of Kathy Acker as it moves through a vibrant, rich and playful mix of underhand lyric. These modern love poems wear their ideologically saturated state on their sleeve, and are all the more loving for that.”
Unpublished endorsement: It is the world’s wild glare that provides the complex heart of Erec & Enide. With wisdom, uncommon wit, and precision, Amy De’Ath’s spirited first book unsettles all things to reveal that neither a language nor a body is a closed system. De’Ath’s is an inclusive imagination that meets the world with lyric intensity and irony—her poems invite us to feel: “stranger, it’s a hunger I’m looking for.” –Peter Gizzi
Unpublished endorsement: Lyrical, local, literary, strong, domestic, delicate, sexy and epic, Amy De’Ath’s Erec & Enide also brings the modernity and speed of much recent North American poetry to these too-often inward-looking isles. “In the lay and spook of an age,” as she says, there is enough screwing over, glamour, residual meaning and resin delight in these poems to intrigue, excite and entertain even the gloomiest reader. De’Ath’s emphatic arrival on the British poetry scene is cause for both hope and celebration. –Tim Atkins
Unpublished endorsement: While we oscillate between life and death, Amy De’Ath’s poetry looks to the whir, the engines and the effects of such daily migrations. She ably slows us to take in and weigh the view, to ask how we construct the ‘publicity of meaning’. De’Ath’s is a sensitive search; and while the unearthed may challenge (‘opened every cupboard looking for the nature of it’), the unanswerable space is enriching.
Erec & Enide is fiery and soft. Let it carry you on wings of seductive metrics and lyric playfulness, below and between timeless narratives. –Amy King
Excellent! I’ll be getting that. All best, Nina