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In this mesmeric retelling of The Fisher King, celebrated poet and essayist Rebecca Tamás makes a call for attention to and connection with the natural world.
In Rebecca Tamás’s remarkable second poetry collection, a grieving, unnamed narrator walks a broken hero's journey through green woods and coastlines, accompanied by the elusive figure of the Fisher King, who nurses his own wound. Along the way, a litany of thinkers—from Anne Carson to St. Silouan the Athonite to John Berger—act as guides and interlocutors.
Drawing on medieval story cycles and giving them a contemporary, intertextual spin, The Fisher King is an avid capturing of the splinters of time and light, and a singing document calling for the knowledge of humans’ interconnectedness with other beings, history, and the future. How, the book asks, can we “be apart, but closely?”
Praise for Rebecca Tamás's previous work
"Freewheeling and spirited, these poems tend to take the form of lengthy streams of consciousness, blurring statements, non sequiturs and disembodied confessions to unpick themes as various as logic and friendship."—Ben Wilkinson, The Guardian
"Rebecca Tamás's WITCH ... is filled with a sort of propulsive demoniac vitality that powers you straight through it, cover to cover. [...] She is wonderfully evocative, appealingly grouchy and possesses... visionary instincts."—James Marriott, The Times
"A pungent highlight of the year."—Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
"I felt as if Tamás's words were burning the page as I read [...] She is the real deal."—Katherine Angel
"This is a book that stays with you, long after you are done reading it."—Dorothea Lasky
"Rebecca Tamás' language is a site of resistance [...] Her words are wet and rich and dirty and full of power."—Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater
"[Tamás] clears a poetic space into which all sorts of meanings, identifications, desires and fantasies can be smuggled, unencumbered by the classically male shackles of rationality [...] hers is a poetry that lifts your spirit."—Desmond Huthwaite, TANK
Rebecca Tamás is an Associate Editor of Oxford Poetry, a MacDowell Fellow, and a recipient of the Sylvia Canfield Winn Fellowship for Environmental Writing. Her first collection of poetry, WITCH, was a Guardian, Times, Telegraph, The White Review, Irish Times, Paris Review and BBC Radio 4 Book of the Year for 2019, as well as a Paris Review Staff Pick and a Poetry Society Recommendation. Rebecca was the winner of the £10,000 Manchester Poetry Prize 2016 and was a 2017 Fenton Arts Trust Writing Fellow. Rebecca works as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City St Georges, University of London.