Being Alive

Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language, creating a bridge between our own times and a Connemara community on the margins of Europe. 

Drawing on classic forms within literary and oral traditions, Ethnology becomes a love song for Connemara, witness to vivid encounters: between the living and the dead and between the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agendas. In this debut book-length collection, fragility and strength are finely balanced, focused on the ruins of an island cottage built by her great-grandfather. Here, Cathy Galvin locates both mourning, humour and joy. The poems give a vivid, original voice to the tradition of keening, of honouring the loss of those we love.

John McCullough's Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community. It probes fragmentation within groups and individuals – disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness, haunted by ghosts from history as they dream of unity and discover joy in deserted corners. To be common here is to share not only qualities but stories with many others – to be classed alongside people with similar origins and become connected also to what is commonplace in the world of animals and plants, days and tables. Sky and sea dominate as the speakers search for oneness and completion, confronted by vast silences and the shadow of Brighton’s collapsing West Pier.

John McCullough has published four previous collections; most recently, the Costa-shortlisted Reckless Paper Birds (2019), winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and Panic Response (2022), which included his long poem 'Flowers of Sulphur', shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. His first collection of poems The Frost Fairs (Salt, 2011) won the Polari First Book Prize.

Polly Clark’s poetry inhabits a world that is strange, unsettling, and edged with danger. 

This retrospective of her work drawns upon her collections Kiss (2000), the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Take Me with You (2005), and Farewell My Lovely (2009), plus Afterlife, a collection of new poems.

Her debut, Kiss, journeys inward, exploring the self with an unflinching gaze, before Take Me with You turns outward to question how we connect – with others, with the wider world, with the unknown. In these collections, her characters, both human and animal, speak in many voices, illuminating the moments when we are most alive – and most alone. Farewell My Lovely  grapples with the price of survival, charting the experience of leaving one's life behind and returning as a stranger. By turns moving and darkly comic, these poems examine the ways we cling to who we were, even as certainty dissolves and the past slips beyond reach. This retrospective of her poetry opens with a magical new collection – also called Afterlife – in which there are no physical limits, nothing is stable and the world is distilled to its elements. The traumatic experience of rape transforms a girl into a tiger, and a tiger into a girl; a whale embraces both air and water until forced to inhabit only one by jealous fish. The poems grapple with the inexplicable nature of some experience, suggesting that we are most real in that mysterious space between living and dying. 

Polly Clark is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her first collection, Kiss, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second, Take Me with You, a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Penelope Shuttle’s History of the Child is a highly evocative exploration of childhood, memory, and imagination, blending personal and historical perspectives. The book’s themes include parenting, grief, nature, emotional recovery and connections to the past, guided by the idea of childhood as a transformative and rebellious space. 

The first of the book’s four sections features poems about Katherine of Aragon, the Vestal Virgins, Stanley Spencer and Wallace Stevens, with a focus on grief, nature, and animals. ​The second, Book of Lullabies, steps closer to the theme of the child, with poems about memory, inwardness, climate change, sexuality in older age, and the natural world. The third part, History of the Child, is a journey back to Penelope Shuttle's own childhood, blending personal memories with imagined perspectives to explore psychological crises, emotional recovery, and the traumas of childhood. ​ It introduces an ‘alternative girl child self’, inspired by Persian legends, by her late husband Peter Redgrove’s dream of such a girl (‘my death, and she is my soul’), and by a friend’s fanciful wish. The culminating fourth section is a playful sequence about a little table, inspired by her mother and her childhood. ​ The table symbolises connection to her mother, who lived to be 100 years old, and their shared history. 

History of the Child is guided by themes of memory, imagination, foreboding, magic, history and humour, and seeks to articulate the essence of ‘being’ through fiery language and elemental imagery. ​ She draws inspiration from Donald Winnicott’s concept of the ‘potentive space’ where play, fantasy and reality intersect.