A Newer Wilderness
Published on 22. April 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
24 pages
978-1-915968-04-3 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Prize.
A Newer Wilderness gives voice to human powerlessness and existential conflict. Amid loss and oppression, attentiveness to animals and nature's immediate present offers inviolate spaces of life-force and grace, enabling hope, tenacity and a precarious path towards redemption. From a panicked winter fieldfare and the evening star's focused light, to the bare trees and the potent scent of mock orange: wild lives are met in their own voiceless states of flux and continual utterance - humanising, vital forces of intelligence and liberation, and our fragile companions.
The title is taken from Emily Dickinson, who feels very much a kindred spirit in these intimate, haunting explorations of a deep and complex reality, in which nature plays a fundamental role in supporting human resilience and survival.
A Newer Wilderness gives voice to human powerlessness and existential conflict. Amid loss and oppression, attentiveness to animals and nature's immediate present offers inviolate spaces of life-force and grace, enabling hope, tenacity and a precarious path towards redemption. From a panicked winter fieldfare and the evening star's focused light, to the bare trees and the potent scent of mock orange: wild lives are met in their own voiceless states of flux and continual utterance - humanising, vital forces of intelligence and liberation, and our fragile companions.
The title is taken from Emily Dickinson, who feels very much a kindred spirit in these intimate, haunting explorations of a deep and complex reality, in which nature plays a fundamental role in supporting human resilience and survival.
Reviews / Votes
'Nicola Healey is a fiercely honest and deeply compassionate poet who isn't afraid to tackle the difficult issues head-on. In this riveting sequence of poems, she demonstrates how, in the unnatural world of illness, diagnosis and treatment, it is our close communion with the natural world that allows the self to be recognised and the soul to be healed.' John Glenday; 'These are remarkable poems - concise and precise, both felt and lived. Healey's is a compelling, dynamic and supple voice and these are poems finely honed, with rare articulacy and insight.' Declan RyanMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 148 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-915968-04-3 (9781915968043)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Nicola Healey's poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Rialto and Wild Court, among other places. She won the PBS Metro Poetry Prize 2021 and was a runner-up in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2020. She is the author of Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).