After You Were, I Am

An extraordinary debut from Camille Ralphs, heralding the arrival of a major new talent. In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book’s three sections – rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee – obsess over individual human characters, and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. This is poetry as incantation, plea and invocation.

Drawing on a vast range of influences, from sacred texts and early modern drama to Metaphysical wit, twentieth-century Confessionalism and contemporary irony and mistrust, this ambitious debut embodies the variety and singularity of living voices past and present, which through rapturous music, anarchic wordplay and formal distortion are dragged to breaking point. The very history of the English language glows through the cracks. The effect is a terrestrial transcendence, as spaces within and between human thoughts expand to reveal a shared heritage of faults and answerless questions at every turn. Ralphs’s style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, maker of poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary.

Camille Ralphs, born 1992, is a poet, critic and editor. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines including the New York Review of Books, The Poetry Review, The Spectator and The London Magazine, and she has released three pamphlets: Malkin (The Emma Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award, uplifts & chains (If A Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020) and Daydream College for Bards (Guillemot Press, forthcoming 2023). She writes critically for publications including The Telegraph, The Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, produces a regular column for Poetry London and conducts an interview series for Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal.

She is Poetry Editor at the Times Literary Supplement. The poem “after Mechthild of Magdeburg” is forthcoming in The New York Review of Books, and other poems are forthcoming in Liberties.