Breaking Ground and Other Poems

Literature & Fiction

Brackenbury, Alison

Poetry

Carcanet Pr

Christmas Roses

Carcanet Press Ltd.

This collection includes the full range of Alison Brackenbury's work, from her longer narrative poems to lyric sequences. Her subject matter touches on horses, horsemanship, travel, history, domesticity, and love.

Alison Brackenbury: Selected Poems

<p><div>Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares, and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Gallop begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons. Her acclaimed early poem, "Dreams of Power," gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on "a thrumming lorry."<br /> <br /> After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.</div></p>

Gallop: Selected Poems

<p>There is something richly circumstantial about Alison Brackenbury's poems: they are often rooted in a rural world, or in townscapes which sustain communities and preserve a strong sense of their history and what it gives them. Thorpeness has delicious surprises, among them 'Aunt Margaret's Pudding,' a rewarding culinary experience based on a black-covered handwritten notebook of recipes from Dorothy Eliza Barnes, 'Dot,' the poet's grandmother. 'When I knew Dot, she was a Lincolnshire shepherd's wife. But, as a young woman, she had been an Edwardian professional cook,' the poet explains, making her notebook a resource for the contemporary reader. The world of nature—birds, plants, weathers—comes alive in poem after poem, but there are also important poems of nurture. Brackenbury belongs in a long line of rural and provincial poets who bring England alive in forms and rhythms of renewal. She is a familiar radio voice, performing her won poems and narrating programmes she has scripted.</p>

Thorpeness

In her latest collection, Alison Brackenbury draws on her lifetime’s experience of rural England, its people, and its ways. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recent floods in Gloucestershire and the signs of a changing climate, the poems reach urgently to both past and future. Keenly aware of both the beauty and the harshness of the natural world, Brackenbury reminds us of our own fragility and responsibility.

Then

After Beethoven

<p><div>The first collection of poetry in over five years from one of the United Kingdom's major poets, these poems reflect the shadows of the greater, known world. As bulldozers tear through a Victorian school, the generosity of the school's founders, the green graceful bell tower, and the nesting jackdaws crying in the air evoke a sense of loss and remembrance. The poetic singing of a woman in a kitchen, Handel at his illicit feast, and Shakespeare as he stops for breath on the stairs nudge humanity forward as these poems turn what is lost in the shouts into song.<br /></div></p>

Bricks and Ballads

While evoking an atmosphere of landscape and memory with sparseness and subtlety, this collection of poems progresses from public to private history—from the foreign and exotic to the familiar and domestic, exploring both death and life.   

Singing in the Dark

Quartet: The Four Seasons

Sail, Lawrence

Alvi, Moniza

Crucefix, Martyn

Khalvati, Mimi

Porteous, Katrina

Harvey, Matt

France, Linda

Tutton, Chris

Schmit, Michael

Avalanche Books

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Books by Brackenbury, Alison