Then
"Then" draws on Alison Brackenbury's lifetime's experience of rural England, its people and its ways, and the threats to its survival. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recurrent floods in Gloucestershire, where she has lived for many years, the poems reach urgently to both past and future, finding connections and disconnections. The signs of a changing climate are emblematic of larger erasures. The poems keenly focus the beauty and the harshness of the natural world. They remind us of our own fragility, and our responsibility: "We are made of water. But we forgot".
About the author
Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953 and studied at Oxford. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she works, as a director and manual worker, in the family metal finishing business. Her Carcanet collections include "Dreams of Power" (1981), "Breaking Ground" (1984), "Christmas Roses" (1988), "Selected Poems" (1991), "1829" (1995), "After Beethoven" (2000) and "Bricks and Ballads" (2004). Her poems have been included on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and 1829 was produced by Julian May for Radio 3. Her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award.
Reviews
"Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet" – Gillian Clarke
"The delicate particularity [...] of her style chimes with that of the world. [...] One hopes that Brackenbury's kind of distinctive formal sensibility won't disappear any time soon" – Vidyan Ravinthiran, Poetry London
"The delicate particularity [...] of her style chimes with that of the world. [...] One hopes that Brackenbury's kind of distinctive formal sensibility won't disappear any time soon" – Vidyan Ravinthiran, Poetry London