Seasonal Disturbances

A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation.  Following her groundbreaking 2014 début An Aviary of Small Birds ("technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak" – Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances.  Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf’s poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &.  As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican émigré, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an "activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love".