Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 lyri
Trade Review
Sam Willetts has been through fire and come back, with his own improbable cantor's quorum ready-assembled around him: mystic, junkie, dealer, truant child, Holocaust survivor, son, lover, brother - he is able to make them all sing, in poems of such fluency and force, such holy fortuity of phrasing, they make us want to celebrate even as they make us mourn. A natural like few others -- Henry Shukman
This letter is sheer poetry to the bard of no fixed abode * Sunday Times interview *
