Poetry

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION

Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light homing in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere, four police officers enter a phone store, concrete pavements hang overhead. Phillips ruminates on violins and violence, on hatred and pleasure, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. His poetry reveals the limitations of our vocabulary, showing that our platitudes are inadequate to the brutal times we find ourselves in. And yet, through interrogation of allegory and symbol, names and things, time and musicality, a language of grace and urgency is found. For still our lives go on, and these are poems of survival as much as indictment. Living Weapon is a piercing, flaring collection from ‘a virtuoso poetic voice’ (Granta).

The prize-winning biography of Wordsworth's beloved sister, champion, muse who was at the heart of the Romantic movement in Britain - reissued to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Dorothy's birth.

'Genius ... Its own kind of heaven.' New York Times

'A most beautiful, deep, and humble study of incredibly complex people.' Oliver Sacks

Dorothy Wordsworth is an enigma. William's beloved sister was his muse, champion, and most valued reader. She is mythologised as a self-effacing spinster and saintly amanuensis, yet Thomas De Quincey described her as 'all fire and ardour'.

Dorothy sacrificed a traditional life to share in her brother's world of words. In her Grasmere Journals, she vividly recorded their intimate life together in the Lake District, marked by a startling freedom from social convention. The tale that unfolds in her brief, electric entries reveals an intense bond between siblings, culminating in Dorothy's collapse on William's wedding day - after which the woman who once strode the hills in all weathers retreated inside the house for the last three decades of her life.

In her magisterial biography, Frances Wilson uses the compressed emotion of Dorothy's journals to evoke the rich interior world of a woman determined to live on her own terms - one who deserves her own place in the history of the Romantic movement.

'Intelligent and intriguing ... A portrait of a peculiar, passionate, yet meticulous woman which is hauntingly strange.' Sunday Telegraph

'Passion is the keynote of Wilson's fine biography ... Brims with the personality of [an] extraordinary woman ... Thrilling.' Sunday Times

'This beautiful, wise biography draws Dorothy from her hiding places. She emerges as a passionate figure.' Daily Telegraph

'Gripping ... Bold, witty, scholarly and speculative.’ Margaret Drabble