Search results for ""Author Jacqueline Saphra""

Velvel's Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement, and migration. Saphra's precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes. Between each poem - forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins - sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.

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One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets by Jacqueline Saphra is a poetic journal that chronicles the personal and political upheavals and tragedies of the Coronavirus pandemic. This sequence of sonnets charts the dislocated, frightening and at times uplifting experience of one hundred days of lockdown. Written as a daily sonnet throughout the first lockdown, from 23rd March 2020, Saphra's candid and revealing sequence is a unique record of strange and unparalleled days. Cover art work by Sophie Herxheimer.

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Jacqueline Saphra will follow her critically acclaimed, T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted All My Mad Mothers (2017) with Dad, Remember You Are Dead, a sister volume to her previous collection, taking on the canon in an examination of fatherhood and daughterhood within a wider context.

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Jacqueline Saphra’s All My Mad Mothers explores love, sex and family relationships in vivacious, lush poems that span the decades and generations. At the heart of this collection of poems is the portrait of a mother as multitudes – as a magician with a bathroom of beauty tricks, as necromancer, as glamourous fire-starter, trapped in ever-decreasing circles and, above all else, almost impossible to grasp.With an emphasis on the cultures of the different times, we tread a tantalising tightrope between the confessional and the invented. These astute poems step assuredly from childhood’s first exposures to the scratched records and unsuitable lovers of young womanhood, the slammed doors of daughters and sons, the tears and salted soups of friendships, and the charms of late love. All the time, incandescent and luminous as an everlasting lightbulb, at the heart of each of Saphra’s poems is a delicate filament kicking out a heavy-duty wattage.

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