Best Sellers:

Another Country | Bloodaxe Books
jane-griffiths-another-country

Jane Griffiths

Another Country

New & Selected Poems

Jane Griffiths

Publication Date : 28 Feb 2008

ISBN: 9781852247942

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection

Jane Griffiths writes mysteriously resonant poems about home, exile and shifting frontiers in classically precise language. Another Country presents a selection from her first two collections, A Grip on Thin Air and Icarus on Earth, as well as a whole collection of new work, Eclogue Over Merlin Street. She has since published a later collection, Terrestrial Variations.

Where the earlier books are shot through with a migrant’s sense of estrangement, her new poems explore what it might mean to settle in a place. The central sequence Eclogue Over Merlin Street highlights this changing perspective through a dialogue between two voices of an immigrant in London, one embracing her new life but the other still haunted by displacement. Many other poems echo this tension, caught between love of a place and the fear of losing it.

Jane Griffiths celebrates the landscapes she lives in by observing and recording them, yet with a strong awareness that these places exist in and of themselves, regardless of her observation. Hers are poems that delight in being in the world, despite the threat of loss.

'Jane Griffiths is a poet attracted to the cross-hatchings of matter and spirit; inner and outer; air and water; foreignness and a sense of home…she has something of the Dutch still-life painter's eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint' – Adam Thorpe, Guardian

'For Griffiths, meaning is not so much to be teased out of the universe as it is to be seen. Her underlying conviction seems to be that, if we can eliminate our own warring needs, distractions and expectations, we can read the language of the world' – Rose Solari, Poet Lore

'A major achievement... outstanding...complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation' - Sarah Broom, Times Literary Supplement

'The extraordinary exuberance of Jane Griffiths's poems is a product of their strange balancing between the image and the idea. The images seem to have a verbal life of their own, generated by a dominating thought that the reader is hardly aware of. But then it dawns on you, slowly but unforgettably, and you enjoy the things in the poem all the more when you see what they are for' - Bernard O'Donoghue

Jane Griffiths reads from Another Country

Jane Griffiths reads seven poems, the first six from Another Country: New & Selected Poems, and the last from the manuscript of Terrestrial Variations: ‘Emigrants’, ‘Migration’, ‘Bilingual’, ‘Russian Dolls’, ‘Auricular’, ‘Another Country’ and ‘Border Crossing’. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed her reading a selection of poems from Another Country and from the manuscript of Territorial Variations before her reading at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 11 July 2012. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed & edited by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2017).


 

  

BOOKS BY Jane Griffiths

Little Silver

Jane Griffiths

Little Silver

Publication Date : 15 Sep 2022

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Silent in Finisterre

Jane Griffiths

Silent in Finisterre

Publication Date : 27 Apr 2017

Read More   amazon.co.uk
Terrestrial Variations

Jane Griffiths

Terrestrial Variations

Publication Date : 23 Feb 2012

Read More   amazon.co.uk
cart
CART
search
TITLE SEARCH

A-Z

AUTHORS

A-Z

CATEGORIES

View Larger Text