Weighing the Present
Description
Weighing the Present includes poems about family and wider society, often through brilliantly evoked particular details and specific scenes from 'everyday life'. Short linked poems, which amount almost to sequences, deal with difficult material - elegies for lost friends for instance - while still remaining somehow lifeaffirming. At the heart of the book are tender but unsentimental love poems.
A new collection from Michael Laskey is always a cause for celebration.
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Person
Michael Laskey is a full time freelance poet, editor, and tutor with many years experience of promoting contemporary poetry.
He has published five collections, most recently Weighing the Present (Smith/Doorstop, 2014) and The Man Alone: New & Selected Poems (2008). His first two collections were Poetry Book Society Recommendations: Thinking of Happiness (Peterloo, 1991) and The Tightrope Wedding (Smith/Doorstop, 1999), which was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. He co-founded the international Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 1989 and directed it through its first decade. He also founded and co-edited the poetry magazine Smiths Knoll with Roy Blackman (1991-2002) and Joanna Cutts (2002-2012) until the final fiftieth issue in November 2012. He published pamphlets under the Smiths Knoll imprint until 2016, many available here and still continues his work as an editor with The Garlic Press (which he established 2003) which principally publishes Suffolk based poets.
