Emily Hasler’s debut collection moves between the local and the distant, the urban and the rural, and past and present. This is a poetry of emotional density underpinned with a lightness of touch. Hasler’s poems are structural but organic, detailed but lively, thoughtful but playful. There is a rare combination of exactitude and wonder which leads the reader in and keeps them there.
Often taking their cue from the work of visual artists, these poems probe at the ways we understand and reconstruct our environment. Examining places, objects, buildings, landscapes, rivers and bridges, these poems ask how our world is made, and how it makes us.
Emily Hasler lives beside the River Stour on the border of Suffolk and Essex. The Built Environment, her critically-acclaimed first collection, was published by Pavilion in 2018. She has been an Early Career Resident at Cove Park, a Hawthornden Fellow and in 2014 received an Eric Gregory Award.