Earth's Almanac - Softcover

Newlyn, Lucy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1910392103 ISBN 13: 9781910392102

Publisher: Enitharmon Press, 2015

Synopsis

The poems in Earth's Almanac emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of the poet's sister. Lucy Newlyn adapts the tradition of the "Shepherd's Calendar" to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year. The poems shift through forms and move between places - Oxford, Borrowdale, and finally Cornwall, where the poet finds a second home near the sea. In these intense expressions of love and loss, anger and guilt, there is no smooth path towards consolation.

About this title

About the Author:

Lucy Newlyn is a professor of English language and literature at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Edmund Hall. She is the author of Reading Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception, which won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. She is the coeditor of two volumes of Creative Writing in Academic Practice, and her poetry was included in the Oxford Poets Anthology. She is the author of the poetry collection Ginnel.

Review:

"It’s a long time since a book of poetry moved me as much as Lucy Newlyn’s Earth’s Almanac (Enitharmon). She has grafted a sequence of elegies for and rememberings of a dead sister over a fifteen year period onto a Shepheard’s Calendar of the natural year. This could lead to mawkishness and sentimentality, but Earth’s Almanac is tough and complex. Often it is impossible to tell if the details of the changing seasons in Cornwall and Oxford, where the poet lives, are the occasions or the metaphors for memory. I loved it." —Sonofabook, on Earth's Almanac Award Win of Book of the Year

“If you require a nostalgic hit of childhood and place, the ingredients which make this collection universal, it is here for you.”  —Leeds Guide on Ginnel

"The fear expressed here is unfounded, however; the collection speaks of her sister with palpable emotion, evoking a real woman for whom we also grieve. It remembers fellow academics Susan Hurley and Graham Midgley with evident tenderness." —Eleanore Widger, dura-dundee.org.uk

About this edition

• Publisher: Enitharmon Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1910392103
• ISBN 13: 9781910392102
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64