Overview
'A quietly elegant book . . . the poems in Gather collect images and thumbnail narratives, but hold their secrets close to their chests, their delicate mysteries blooming in beauty' VICTORIA CHANG, Forward Prize-winning author of Tree of Knowledge
'Malene Engelund's poems are bright with elemental beauty. To read this collection is to enter into new relationship with a charged world in which love 'breaks and finds a new form', each poem radiant with the desire 'to gather as much colour as possible' SARAH WESTCOTT, shortlisted for the Ledbury Poetry Prize and Laurel Prize
'A visceral collection of poems. It's a unique book, and that is a very rare thing to be able to say' DAVID NASH, winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize, shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize.
'Malene Engelund's collection opens in the aftermath of an emotional storm [...] but in the poems that follow a mother gathers different threads together to weave a future for herself and her sons . . . poems engaging with the colour blue bring a bright stitch of precise and sensuous language as desire and hope return' LORRAINE MARINER, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize
The poems in Malene Engelund's debut collection, Gather, speak of resilience and repair. These poems are evidence of a gathering of the self, as well as the gathering in of others; of children, of totemic artists, musicians and other touchstones, summoned as solid air to 'hang the words for ruin on'. A sequence of 'Variations', imagistic in their shape and shot through with colour and light, help to frame work taking place at 'the edge of our atmosphere', on thresholds, or at the point of fracture.
These are poems which look the reader in the eye, which dive in 'despite the fear of going under', and which seek to carry out their acts of restoration, and freedom, while burning off what can no longer be borne.
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