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Description
An exhilarating second collection from the author of Three Poems, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and John Pollard Poetry Prize.
Was It for This continues the project of Three Poems, offering a trenchant exploration of the ways we attempt to map our lives in space and time. But there is a reckoning, too, with the collective experience of historic event and present disaster. ‘Tenants’, the first poem, is fuelled by the particular anxieties of a mother of young children living in the vicinity of Grenfell Tower at the time of its destruction. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts
of seventies and eighties London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points and sites for revisiting. There is a memorialising strain in the forensic accumulation of detail but also celebration, a keen sense of holding onto and cherishing what we can.
Faber
