Description
Book SynopsisThe poems in Earth's Almanac emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of the poet's sister. Lucy Newlyn adapts the tradition of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year. The poems shift through forms and move between places - Oxford, Borrowdale, and finally Cornwall, where the poet finds a second home near the sea. In these intense expressions of love and loss, anger and guilt, there is no smooth path towards consolation.
Trade Review'Don't doubt that this is very good poetry indeed ... If you require a nostalgic hit of childhood and place, the ingredients which make this collection universal, it is here for you.' - The Leeds Guide on GINNEL; 'It's a long time since a book of poetry moved me as much as Lucy Newlyn's Earth's Almanac (Enitharmon). She has grafted a sequence of elegies for and rememberings of a dead sister over a fifteen year period onto a Shepheard's Calendar of the natural year. This could lead to mawkishness and sentimentality, but Earth's Almanac is tough and complex. Often it is impossible to tell if the details of the changing seasons in Cornwall and Oxford, where the poet lives, are the occasions or the metaphors for memory. I loved it.'- Gabriel Josipovici, TLS
