Description
“Astounding: powerfully fragile, strongly precarious, harmoniously raging, ultimately tender. Speculative stories are hinted at, in a voice so musical that we would follow it anywhere. It takes us into the garden, to a lighthouse, through nuclear holocaust. Poems probe the thick facts of plant life (figs, wasps, pollen), and our human entanglement. Ordered to flourish in a ‘hostile environment’, this poet peels apart our perverse systems. A personal heritage of European war, migration, and music translates into lullaby and confrontation. There is a forest of allusions—Jane Hirshfield and Etel Adnan, among others—including an Edwin Morgan-esque sonic nonsense investigation that sounds the soil of the seabed, and of a nuclear plant. A book in the best traditions of yearning, warning, mischief, and hope.” Anthony Vahni Capildeo
“Agata Maslowska finds uncanny intersections between the things that continue to grow in these fallow end times. Viewing the world from the soil up, these poems are deeply attuned to the movements of nature, people and ideas—from the fruitful and fricative collisions of new and old languages, to the legacy of European war and displacement. Musical, allusive, and always formally subversive, these are poems of precise philosophical enquiry that make the reader see this tired old world afresh.” Jessica Traynor
“These poems moved me. Agata’s poetics is a combination of disarming confrontation and something much subtler, a semantic sleight of hand. Her lines and phrases often have a directness that reproduces the flat affect of found text, such that even the invocation of simile—harshly marked out from the surrounding language—evinces a self-consciousness that amounts to a kind of hardness. The effect is striking. Her use of actual images is novel too; repeat photography and landscape photographs summon the spirit of Nan Shepherd and mark Agata out as a deeply insightful, formally innovative writer. She is a truly exciting exophonic, Scottish voice.” Sophie Collins
OUT 25TH SEPTEMBER 2025
ISBN: (Paperback) 978-1-913268-76-3 (ePub) 978-1-913268-77-0
