A Perfect Mirror (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781786941015)

Walking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett's fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence - part found poem, part assemblage - draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights - a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child - attempt to balance the darkness.


Author: Sarah Corbett
ISBN-10: 1786941015
ISBN-13: 9781786941015
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2018
Pages: 64
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.10lbs
Size: 7.40h x 4.70w x 0.20d

About the Author

Born in 1970, Sarah grew up in North Wales and gained a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from Manchester University in 2013. Her first collection of poetry 'The Red Wardrobe' (Seren, 1998) won the Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Best First Collection Prize. She followed with 'The Witch Bag' (Seren, 2002), 'Other Beasts' (Seren, 2008) as well as 'And She Was' (Pavilion Poetry, 2015). She currently lives in the Calder Valley and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing for Lancaster University.