The Marble Orchard (Paperback or Softback)

Sandeep Parmar's powerful debut collection, The Marble Orchard, steps boldly through the personal archive of family histories to art, literature and the imagined lives of modern and ancient heroines, from Mina Loy to Ovid's Heroides. Her experiments are set apart by their pure charge of language and textual silences, inherited from the distance between home, identity and memory.

"The Marble Orchard is a powerful debut collection. Sandeep Parmar has a fearless and innovative voice, ambitious, searching, richly-lyrical. This is work grounded-in and tempered by wide and informed scrutiny of history, exile, memory and literature. Experience extends metaphor here, and metaphor rehearses and assesses experience. She holds her nerve from start to finish, demonstrating a rare and refreshing seriousness of intent and achievement. These are vital and arresting poems." -Penelope Shuttle

"The Marble Orchard is bold, inventive and confident. Each poem makes demands of the reader but offers at once great richness of vocabulary, image and rhythm. There is great range of setting and reference but above all tremendous verbal sensuousness. This is a wonderful debut." -Jeffrey Wainwright

Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs Liverpool's Centre for New and International Writing. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her books include "Reading Mina Loy's Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern", an edition of the "Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees" (Carcanet, 2011), and three books of her own poetry published by Shearsman: "Faust", a Poetry Book Society Choice, "The Marble Orchard" and "Eidolon", winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection. She also edited the "Selected Poems of Nancy Cunar" (Carcanet, 2016). Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement and BBC Radio 3. She is co-founder of the Ledbury Poetry Critics scheme for poetry critics of colour. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.