Book description
Sarah Maguire's rich and lyrical poems have been highly praised for
the ease with which they ground precise, sensual detail within the
wider context of world events. In this remarkable new collection, her
poems travel greater distances than ever before.
The title poem laments the devastation visited upon Afghanistan
following decades of war. Other poems consider the casualties of
political unrest: would-be migrants in Tangiers gazing northwards at
the longed-for phantasmagoria of 'Europe'; and packs of wolves on the
loose in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. But there are intimate poems too,
often using scientific vocabularies to offset a personal moment, as in
'Landscape, with Dead Sea' where the erosion of the poet's skin is
connected to geological transformations at the earth's core.
Born in 1957, Sarah Maguire has published three previous collections
of poetry,
Spilt Milk
,
The Invisible Mender
and
The Florist's at Midnight
, as well as the anthology
Flora Poetica: the Chatto Book of
Botanical Verse
. She is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre at
SOAS, and was co-translator with Yama Yari of Afghan writer Atiq
Rahimi's
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear
(Chatto, 2006). She is also Founder of the Poetry Translation Centre,
responsible for introducing a wide range of international poets into
English. Sarah Maguire has lived all her life in west London.
