Spiritlands by Sarah Wardle
Spiritlands invites you into a territory that is at once individual and plural. On the one hand, this is poetry about a personal geography, an eclectic landscape, space in which to be oneself and welcome who one chooses to express hospitality towards; on the other, these are poems all about hope, life and nature, about belonging to the whole world and asserting one’s right to a place and voice in it. The drive of this collection is spirit in the sense of the courage it takes to true to one’s instincts. There is a timelessness to the poems in this book and a sense of what endures. Here is oneness with existence, an appreciation of the universe, a happiness that springs from standing on the globe and the feeling of being a living, breathing soul in it.
Sarah Wardle writes with great humanity and makes A Knowable World of the indignity, frustrations and fear of acute episodes of mental illnessThat’s how she manages to get her readers to empathise with all those in the community, both in and out of hospital, who live with the stigma of madness’ – Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger.
Sarah Wardle was born in London in 1969. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College; Oxford, where she read Classics; and Sussex, where she read English. She won Poetry Review’s new poet of the year award in 1999 and her first collection, Fields Away (Bloodaxe Books, 2003), was shortlisted for the Forward best first collection prize. Her second book, SCORE! (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), included some of the poems she broadcast while poet-in-residence for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, as well as the script of a film-poem, ‘X: A Poetry Political Broadcast’. A Knowable World (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) followed her detainment in a Central London psychiatric hospital. Her most recent Bloodaxe collections are Beyond (2014) and Spiritlands (2019). She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and works as lecturer in poetry at Middlesex University and as a creative writing tutor for Morley College, Westminster Kingsway College and the Workers’ Educational Association.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781780374345 |
| ISBN 10 | 1780374348 |
| Title | Spiritlands |
| Author | Sarah Wardle |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2019-02-21 |
| Number of pages | 64 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |