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Sidereal
Rachael Boast’s first collection is dominated by astral influence and divine chance, by unseen or remote causes; but despite its celestial title, Sidereal is full of terrestrial concerns, the traffic and chaos of the human and natural worlds. Ultimately, however, it is the work of a poet who believes that we must also turn our gaze skywards to make sense of who we are, and these poems pursue their elliptical but inevitable orbits through a world where the earthly and transcendent are thoroughly interfused. Above all, Sidereal impresses through Boast’s lyric faith, which through even the worst pain and despair can still offer its clarities and revelations, and announces an important new voice in British poetry. Sidereal is winner of the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2012.
Void Studies
Void Studies, Rachel Boast's extraordinary new collection, realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never written. Études néantes was to consist of poems written as musical études; these would not convey any direct message - but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject. This 'impossible project' has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing way, and in doing so she has increased the expressive possibilities of poetry itself. These tone poems are indeed works of pure music - but despite their esoteric nature are by no means 'difficult' in the usual sense: instead they conjure the recognizable states, emotions, moods, ambiances and strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a kind of lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book - one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer the most profound questions poetry can frame.
Pilgrim's Flower
Rachael Boast’s first collection, Sidereal, was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second, Pilgrim's Flower, richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent – but where Sidereal’s gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens, Boast’s focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings life’s intoxicants – love, nature, literature, friendship, and other forms and methods of transcendence – and sees Boast’s pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim's Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things – the slippage between what we think we know, and what is actually there – and in doing so brings the language of rite, observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.
Hotel Raphael
Hotel Raphael, Rachael Boast’s fourth collection, charts a journey through heat, drought and pain, and describes not only the reality of chronic illness, but living with it at a time of global crisis. Raphael is the patron saint of travellers and pilgrims, and also of healing; in the search for remedy, we pass through the balm of landscape, and brush against the worlds of artists, writers and filmmakers, whose angels broadcast to us from other rooms. We also encounter the biblical figure of Job, who poses the question of a terrible forbearance: how much suffering can we take, and what can we realistically change? While we fight to relieve our own pain, address the planet’s ecological imbalance and make efforts, large or small, to right its shocking injustices, we must also simply find a way through. Hotel Raphael sees Boast compose an extraordinary travelling song, one that shows us how to bear our pain without trying to erase its source.
W. S. Graham and Lyric Self-Consciousness
This book examines the lyric poetry of the late modernist W. S. Graham. By listening closely to his body of work, it exposes the capacity of a poem to describe itself being made in the mind of a reader. The study locates an idea of lyric self-consciousness not only at the level of ego, but as a process of form. Archival material – including worksheets, manuscripts and notebooks – is used to examine Graham's spatial conception of verse in the context of his industrial background and his dialogue with artists. The book offers close readings of the adjacent poetics of William Empson and Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and concludes with a sustained analysis of Denise Riley's long-term engagement with Graham’s poetry, which suggests how Graham’s lyric experiments can be politicised.
Scotland’s Harvest
This study is the first exploration of the impact of World War Two on Scottish poets of both the front line and the home front. World War One has always been thought of as a poet’s war, one of horror and futility. The poetry of World War Two, by contrast, has long languished in its shadow, though there was a much greater amount of it written. This book asks whether these poets felt they were grown for war or rather that they grew through war experience, with an emphasis on the possibilities of the future instead of cataloguing the senseless horror of the battlefield. How were the hopes of Scottish poets different from their English counterparts? How was their poetry different, and how did it impact on their later lives?
Ecological Exile
Ecological Exile explores how contemporary literature, film, and media culture confront ecological crises through perspectives of spatial justice – a facet of social justice that looks at unjust circumstances as a phenomenon of space. Growing instances of flooding, population displacement, and pollution suggest an urgent need to re-examine the ways social and geographical spaces are perceived and valued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Maintaining that ecological crises are largely socially produced, Derek Gladwin considers how British and Irish literary and visual texts by Ian McEwan, Sarah Gavron, Eavan Boland, John McGrath, and China Miéville, among others, respond to and c...
W. S. Graham
David Nowell Smith draws on newly available archival materials to examine the work of British poet W. S. Graham. This book views Graham's work in light of the idea of the poem as 'art object', looking at both his written and visual/mixed-media artworks.
Volvelle
Volvelle, Rachael Boast’s fifth poetry collection, highlights the need to remember old forms of connection in an era of fragmentation and technological acceleration. Her title embodies something of this in its elegant, recurring consonants – conjuring love, revolve, evolve, the volvelle a circular paper chart of rotating parts for calculating the cycles of the sun and the moon. There are poems here in conversation with Akhmatova, Cocteau, Lorca, Mirabai, Tennyson and Sufi poetry, while others move in the atmospheres of French, Polish and Spanish arthouse cinema. Boast’s coolly passionate collection also explores the need for a sense of place and belonging, and enquires into the overlap between disability and ‘the body politic’ with a fusing of poetry and reportage on global conflicts and ecocide. With a keen sense of roots and interrelatedness, Volvelle circles the question of what it means to stay human in our age of anxiety, unrest and hyper-materialism.
Resurgence
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