The Things We Leave Behind gathers poems from all five of Josephine Balmer's acclaimed volumes, excavating a common ground between the distant past and our contemporary world. From the universal grief that echoes down through the centuries in both her ground-breaking first collection, Chasing Catullus (2004), and later Letting Go (2017), to the mirroring of ancient exile and modern warfare in The Word for Sorrow (2009), her poetry finds urgent new ways to voice 'the sound of words you can't say'. The Paths of Survival (2017), shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize and a Poetry Book of the Year in The Times, explores the fragility of the written word; Ghost Passage (2022) mines the debris of everyday lives from the 'dark earth' of Roman London, rendering them fresh and familiar. Edited and introduced by Paschalis Nikolaou, this Selected Poems also includes new verse from Balmer's work-in-progress, Archaeology of Home, unearthing the devastating effect of dementia on families past and present. The Things We Leave Behind offers new insights into Balmer's poignant and compelling work, celebrating her 'necromancer's task of easing breath / into moss-flecked lungs of our long, long dead'.
Josephine Balmer studied Classics and Ancient History at University College, London and has a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. As well as poetry, she has also published translations of Sappho (revised 2018), an anthology of classical women poets (1996) and Catullus (2004), alongside a study of creative translation, Piecing Together the Fragments (2013).
Paschalis Nikolaou is Associate Professor in Literary Translation at the Ionian University, Greece, and author of The Return of Pytheas: Scenes from British and Greek Poetry in Dialogue (2017) and Creative Classical Translation (2023).
