ATG’s co-editor, Abegail Morley, has just published her new collection, The Unmapped Woman and it is available HERE from Nine Arches Press.
This new collection explores the altitudes of loss and trauma, mapping the stark new territory that loss leaves behind and the landmarks of recovery and survival.
Several lives and life-changing themes cross paths in this clear-sighted and profound book, and Morley’s adept and courageous poetry guides us through the wooded shades and raw coastlines, dauntless: “Bear with me. I can take nature, let wind whip our faces”. From the hollowing of the empty place and the five stages of grief, these resolute poems with their mettle and wholeheartedness, chart their remarkable, bold course towards the voicing of a song, the light of the next day.
“In The Unmapped Woman, Morley writes with astonishing technical virtuosity as she searches for recovery through art. As in her previous poems, water is a recurrent motif and the emotional core of the collection. Narrative and emotion are compressed within the single telling image, and the spaces between words, lineation and enjambment recollect the lost presence from where the poems emerge. George Eliot reminds us that ‘there is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms’. If Eliot seems to imply that what is most distinctive remains hidden, Morley speaks in a voice that is eloquent and precise as she seeks to understand what happens to the vanished.” – Nancy Gaffield
“Abegail Morley is a natural poet. Each poem seems exhaled in a single necessary breath as she unflinchingly addresses traumatic events. Her language is fresh, fluent and unadorned, with strikingly accurate images, and endings that make the reader re-consider the whole poem. The loss of a baby, suicide of a loved one and the concomitant depersonalisation of the self that dealing with such grief brings is covered with a magical lightness of touch. This is a highly talented, original voice well worth listening to.” – Patricia McCarthy
“The Unmapped Woman transports you deep under the surface of a life, to places too often skimmed. In it we find the grief we wear like a sweater, the fragile expectancy of motherhood in which, “I don’t know / which one of us is the honey, which the bee, / or who has the nectar we drink so deeply.” (‘Daughter Bulb’), the ghosts that haunt us, and the beauty that ambushes us. This collection, its probing intensity, is reminiscent of contemporary American masters like Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Carolyn Forché, yet decidedly British in tone. Morley knows exactly what she is doing here. The work stays with you, like “the way he planted a word in her mouth / to germinate after he’d gone.” (“The hollowing of the empty place”) These are poems to live with–tight as the skin of a drum.” – Robert Peake
‘Jane Lovell’s writing charts mysterious, unsettling trajectories: the invisible paths of bees, the journey of dead light, the routes found in folded and untied landscapes. These poems unmoor us, find beauty and strangeness in the everyday.’ – Helen Mort
We have asked our most recently published poets what they are working now. The launch of Litany of a Cardiologist was postponed but we have plans to launch it in the autumn.
‘Drawing from her own life working in paediatric cardiac care, Denise Bundred’s debut collection leads us inside the hospital, to wander its wards and corridors, into the operating room and the mind of the cardiologist. We find medics, exceptionally skilled, working at the cutting edge of medicine, but also still human, wiping sweat from their hands, taking time to breathe and reflect. I couldn’t help but be moved. I know these rooms; I have heard the cardiologist speak. The poems navigate fear and pressure with convincing authority, but you will also find compassion and hope in these pages. Bundred has composed a love letter to the heart, and the working lives devoted to its complex chambers.’ – Rebecca Goss
Against the Grain Poetry Press 