Yelp!

Liz Almond's impressive second collection of poems about regeneration, recuperation, reclamation and retreat, in which the poet reflects on visits, both literal and virtual, to remote parts of Greece, Andalucia and Southern India. In one group of poems, she even leaves the earth entirely to look down at its 'hotspots' from satellite positions.

Rituals of travel are at the heart of Liz Almond's work; and travel, in her poems, can start anywhere: through a computer screen offering access to a satellite view of continents, to a pencil hovering like a bee at the start of a poem about a zoo for husbands. Departures and arrivals, free exchanges of words at the border controls of language — all these feed into poems that embody a rich and sensual sense of cultural difference, an understanding of the scale and fragility of our planet. And the imaginative routes she opens for us are full of surprises: a gecko may become a mouth-watering feast; a god may step onto a mountain path in homespun wool hunting for her mortal self.

Liz Almond's poems journey both ways — into the trials and pleasures of the body, and towards that luminous part of us sensed when we're open to the material riches of a world we must inhabit with respect, or lose.

ISBN: 978-1-904614-38-8 (pbk), 978-1- 904614-91-3 (hbk)

Dimensions: 138 x 216 mm
Pages: 94
Published July 2009

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