Annemarie Austin's vividly imaginative poems explore other worlds and other lives, drawing upon her own memories and experiences, as well as on art, travel, dream, myth, history and literature. The first poem in her new collection asks 'Shall we go on the shiny?', the last one ends 'being altogether gone this time'. In between there's the tightrope, 'The Walking Shot', the report on the pilgrimage in progress, the marquise going out at five o'clock. The eye moves left to right along with the poems' movement. Though there are stops from time to time, for problems of the unidentified, the location of waterholes, whether or not those birds are oystercatchers, for the interior of a pocket and Nijinsky jumping. Then on, maybe to the beach again. Shall We Go? is Annemarie Austin's eighth book of poetry, following her Bloodaxe retrospective, Very: New & Selected Poems (2008) and later collection Track (2014).
Price: $15.95
Pages: 72
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Imprint: Bloodaxe Books
Publication Date:
11 January 2022
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781780375533
Format: Paperback
Austin is a fable maker. Hers is a poetry of parts held together by powerfully imagined dream associations. As her world deliquesces and reforms, her imagination breathes life into other people in other times, weirdly authenticating the material she draws from history.'
Annemarie Austin was born in Devon and grew up on the Somerset Levels and in Weston-super-Mare, where has lived for most of her life. She won the Cheltenham Literature Festival Poetry Competition in 1980, and her first collection, The Weather Coming (1987), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Very: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) includes work from all her collections, including On the Border (1993), The Flaying of Marsyas (1995), Door upon Door (1999) and Back from the Moon (2003). She has since written two further collections, Track (2014), and Shall We Go? (2021).
