Bloodaxe Books of the Year 2023

I Think We're Alone Now by Abigail Parry, shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2023

‘With I Think We’re Alone Now, Abigail Parry follows her flamboyant debut in Jinx (2018) with yet more pyrotechnics as she sets out to investigate the nature of intimacy.  Each poem is a freshly conceived and high-spirited assault, outwitting the reader’s expectations in pursuit of uncomfortable home truths.’ – Christopher Reid, Sunday Independent (Books of 2023)

'I Think We’re Alone Now is Parry’s second collection. Only published in November, it has been shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious poetry award – the TS Eliot Prize. Parry herself defines the book as running of failure – as her intention was for it to be about intimacy. Instead, the poems range from pop music, to etymology, surveillance equipment to cervical examination and church articles – but yet, intimacy is found in the reading experience and each poem’s genuine honesty.' – Wales Arts Review (Best Welsh Poetry of 2023)

‘The book I’d like to recommend is Abigail Parry’s I Think We’re Alone Now. I first heard Abigail Parry perform her work at this year’s Penarth Literary Festival Poetry Showcase and was caught by her vivid voice and the intelligence of her rhythm and clarity.  She can shock you and skin you with her wit, yet her poems feel strangely merciful, cleverly observant, and filled with references to everything from Rilke and Shakespeare to Richie Cordell and Radiohead.’ – Katie Munnik, Wales Arts Review (Books of the Year 2023)

‘Abigail Parry continues to write about anything she turns her eye on with cheerily nonchalant sprezzatura;’ – John Clegg, London Review Bookshop (Books of the Year 2023)

‘Brilliantly realised and very, very, very close to the eye. A major book.’ – Patrick Davidson Roberts, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023), on I Think We’re Alone Now

A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection & the T S Eliot Prize 2023; longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023

‘The still calm at the heart of Jane Clarke’s poems is the key to their extraordinary emotive power. Sufficiently detached to enable reflection, yet infused with the light of a daughter’s love, Clarke’s poems navigate a passage through a rural Irish landscape whose beauty is bound up indivisibly with the easy intuition of those who inhabit it and whose seasonally changeful, and comfortingly changeless, appearance is a conduit to meditation.’ – Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times (Book Review Round-Up: 2023)

‘And in Irish poetry I am so pleased to see the success and acclaim for a former University of Glamorgan Masters alumna, Jane Clarke, whose new collection, A Change in the Air, is as good as anything from the UK this year...’ – Tony Curtis, The Lonely Crowd (Books of the Year 2023)

'Two very different poetry collections are keeping my bedside table happy, Ocean Vuong’s thrilling Time is a Mother and Jane Clarke’s A Change of Air. Some of Clarke’s work, in particular, is so close to the way I am thinking now about care and compassion, I feel recognised and lifted by her lines.' – Anne Enright, The Irish Times (The best books of 2023 so far)

Earth House by Matthew Hollis, longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023

‘Attuned to the interconnections between landscape, language and ecology, Matthew Hollis’ Earth House is an astounding and deeply immersive collection that moves from elegiac loss to the birth of new life. Musical, layered and reflective, the poems magnify the environmental tremors we so often wreak in our wake, all the while suggesting the quiet possibility of another, more attentive way of being in the world, premised before anything on astonishment.’ – Nikolai Duffy, The Tablet (Books of the Year 2023)

Out of Sri Lanka edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne & Shash Trevett, Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

‘My anthology of the year was Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English poetry from Sri Lanka and its diasporas, edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett, which is everything an anthology should be: conscientious, archival, surprising, world-building, full of voices and lives.’ – Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Times Literary Supplement (Books of the Year 2023)

‘This generous, essential anthology of “Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas” is endlessly varied, moving and enlightening … While it is, of course, focused on specific histories and experiences, the suffering and the questions it raises remain painfully resonant for the wider world at the ruinous close of 2023.’ – Simon Barraclough, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023), on Out of Sri Lanka

Mapping the Future edited by Karen McCarthy Woolf & Nathalie Teitler

'The year also saw three noteworthy anthologies ... Mapping the Future (Bloodaxe), edited by Nathalie Teitler and Karen McCarthy Woolf, brings together poems and essays from the 30 graduates of the Complete Works, the programme that did so much to bring recognition to British-based poets of colour such as Malika Booker and Roger Robinson.' – Rishi Dastidar, The Guardian (Best poetry books of 2023)

'I would recommend Selima Hill's Women in Comfortable Shoes.  There's no-one like her. And everyone likes her. I don't know how she does that.' – Ali Lewis, The Poetry Society (Poetry Books of the Year 2023)

Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire by MacGillivray

‘A toweringly original - multi-genre, documentary, polyphonic, heteroglossic - tour-de-force from MacGillivray, reminiscent of her The Last Wolf of Scotland in its unique and restless form and visionary imagination. No one else is writing like this. No one has ever written like this. Except maybe Kristjan Norge.’ – Steve Ely, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023), on Ravage

FORTHCOMING TITLES CHOSEN FOR BOOKS OF THE YEAR FEATURES IN 2023

Tanya (April 2024) by Brenda Shaughnessy

‘This book inspired me with its agile, living poems that move like quicksilver— such speed and lightness remind me of that chiaroscuro quality of paintings in the Met that seem impossibly dimensional.’ – Nathaniel Rosenthalis, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023), on Tanya

BACKLIST TITLES CHOSEN FOR BOOKS OF THE YEAR FEATURES IN 2023

Towards a General Theory of Love (2022) by Clare Shaw

'I am rarely able to say that I liked every single poem in a collection, but this book is an exception to that rule. Shaw’s poems explore the complexities of grief, trauma and love, often through the figure of ‘Monkey’.  Shaw’s monkey figure represents the controversial psychology experiments conducted by Harry Harlow on baby monkeys in the 1950s, which proved that we need care, contact and love to survive.' – Rachel Carney, Created to Read (My Top 5 Books of 2023 - Poetry)

A God at the Door (2021) by Tishani Doshi, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021

'A God at the Door by Tishani Doshi is full of stand-out poems - dynamic, heartbreaking, full of colour and rage. I keep going back to it only to find even more depths, more colours, the whole world's in there!' – Pascale Petit, Poetry Society (Poetry Books of the Year 2023)

Wild Nights: New & Selected Poems (2015) by Kim Addonizio

‘The collection, which I recently re-read, is alive with edgy diction, brazenness and erotic humour. Poems startle with their intimacy, while sensual imagery underscores emotions. Female characters are determined to throw off inhibitions, though perhaps only in their imaginations. The author’s fabulous poem ‘What Do Women Want?’ is included.’ – Victor Tapner, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023)

[21 December 2023]

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