Book description
The poems in this remarkable first collection have been hard won:
'Fruits of much grief they are,' as Donne said, 'emblems of more.'
Having lost ten years to heroin addiction and recovery, Sam Willetts
emerges now - suddenly, and apparently from nowhere - as a
fully-fledged and significant English poet.
In a book deeply conscious of history, one series of poems tracks
his mother's escape, as a young girl, from the Nazis, in a narrative
that moves from a Stuka attack on the Smolensk Road to the Krakow
ghetto, the destruction of Warsaw, to Nuremberg and Nagasaki and,
finally, his mother's grave. Other poems address Englishness, secular
Jewishness, and the childhood pleasures of Oxfordshire - an
increasingly deceptive pastoral, stalked and eventually shattered by
heroin, which brings a grim new existence among dealers and users. The
redemption the poet finds, through detox and rehab, love and writing,
is full of regret for the years and lives wasted, but also offers a
lyrical rebirth of the senses: 'In a new light, a new moon/ that isn't
made of scorched tinfoil/will turn your tide again'.
Deft, economical and wonderfully original, this is work that
celebrates the peaks and troughs of a lived life, the poems' vivid
clarity feeling both fresh and fully earned. It is rare to find an
unknown poet of such mature quality, and New Light for the Old
Dark represents a brilliant dawning.
Sam Willetts was born in 1962 and has spent most of his life in
Oxford, where he read English at Wadham College, and in London. He has
worked as a teacher, journalist and travel writer.
