Description
Book SynopsisThe poems in Miriam Gamble’s third collection journey surreally through scenes and landscapes at once of the world and of the mind, finding little, as they go, that 'can be claimed self-evident'. By turns uncanny, dark, poignant and uproarious, What Planet sets the individuality of perception and the inventiveness of memory against fixed certainties, probing chaos and madness in a post-truth world. Rhythmically propulsive and dizzyingly inter-connective, Gamble’s new work is as formally adventurous as it is conceptually distinctive, stretching syntax, jumbling the solid and spectral, crossing borders of time and space. Yet this is also a collection pained by loss, and passionate to connect with a life’s 'vacated' corners – even if the act of remembering is as much creation as recovery. Winner of the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize.
Trade ReviewGamble can be very funny as she winds up grandly rhetorical phrases for seemingly inconsequential events… The book’s best poems offset that witty, jiving, occasionally arch voice with tender, slower effects... -- John McAuliffe * Irish Times *
These poems… understand the relation between form and violence, understand that craft and control can be acts of brute force too – against the other, even against the self. The Squirrels Are Dead is a collection of extraordinary formal versatility and skill. -- Fran Brearton * Edinburgh Review *
Experimental and wide-ranging, her work is by turns lyrical, surreal and quirkily humorous. Her debut collection shows that she is already a writer of considerable achievement and one who looks set to promise more in the future. -- David Cooke * The North *
Table of Contents11 The Landing Window Is Unspeakable 12 The Oak That Was Not There 13 Time Ball 14 Odradek Returns 15 Wonderland 16 Amethyst 17 Coda 21 Feria de Málaga 22 Leòdhasach 23 The Holy Host in Spanish Art 24 Gutties 25 Alchemist 26 Betty Staff’s 28 Feldspar 30 Incident Report 31 The Wits 32 Oils of Sculptors Working 35 Crane Fly 36 Parotia Displaying in a Forest Clearing 37 Plume 38 Girl with Book and Rubber Bands 40 Bloater 41 Enkidu’s Worm 42 Mare at Large 43 Credentials 44 Siete Lagunas 45 Kitten 49 Marine Snow 50 The Canal at Fountainbridge 52 Gardyloo 54 Little Monument: Se Vende 55 In Memoriam Your Stuff 56 Urn 57 Handwriting 58 Wormhole, Westlink 61 In the Annum 63 Abandoned Asylum 64 Sometimes Nothing 66 Winter Sunday 67 Holograph 68 Person 70 In the Recliner 71 Madeleine 72 IndyRef, 2014 73 Samhain 74 Moths 79 Notes
