Poet: Jacob Polley

A daring new collection from one of poetry’s rising stars.

Little Gods established Jacob Polley as one of the leading talents of the younger generation; his third collection sees him extend that gift in often wholly unexpected directions. As before, Polley’s work is often unashamedly lyric, and displays a virtuosic range of form and address. However, the light has changed in The Havocs: these poems are often imbued with the weird, uncanny and otherworldly, drawing on the folkloric and mythic traditions of north Britain—as well as forms from older English traditions, including riddles and cautionary tales. However oblique his strategies, Polley’s work remains fixed on our most central concerns: our losses of faith, our working lives, our irrational fears and our loves. The Havocs charts a daring new turn in the work of one of our finest English poets.

The debut collection from the poet considered to be the new Paul Farley. Jacob Polley already has a formidable reputation as one of the sharpest and most unusual new voices to have appeared on the scene in many years. Now, with the publication of his first collection, The Brink, readers will have their first opportunity to see his remarkable transforming imagination in action, where a jar of honey is ‘…the sun, all flesh and no bones / but for the floating knuckle / of honeycomb / attesting to the nature of the struggle’, and a gull’s hovering is ‘suddenly akin / to dangling on a coat hook / by the back of a coat you’re still in’.