Literature

The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird’s speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air.

Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.

The Bees is Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection of poems as Poet Laureate. In it she uses her full poetic range: there are drinking songs, love poems, poems of political anger; there are elegies, too, for beloved friends, and – most movingly – the poet’s own mother.

The provocative wordsmith is back: this time with her first novel, The Conquest of the Red Man. It is the story of Corinne Zed, a penniless bourgeoise who makes a meagre living from writing. She decides, at the age of 39, to add a little piquant to her life – rich people are so boring – and experience romantic passion at long last. What could be more exciting than falling in love with a leftist who, in a previous life, planted bombs? The problem is that she loves to eat. It’s not reasonable to start a revolution when it’s time to eat and drink champagne. By the way, is revolution edible?

Always on the scout for her next great meal, Corinne experiences a political-literary love story that takes her from right to left, from Stendhal to Lenin and from Brussels to New York via Turin and Paris. Even if she discovers how to make a grand entrance into Leftie-land, will her dreams be fulfilled?

This caustic novel contains a generous dose of gustatory eroticism, fabulously crunchy nuggets, and a blow-job that would make Lenin turn bright red. Politics is never far away, but nothing gets in the way of the pleasure of reading – proof that the left is dissolvable in irony. It is also a sharp chronicle of our society.

Virginia Astley has been a much admired songwriter and musician since the 1980s, known for her engaging lyrics as well as for her melodious style. Now her other two passions take centre stage in this book: poetry and the River Thames. She grew up by the river’s upper reaches, knew the old lock-keepers and was familiar with all aspects of the Thames and its hinterland: both the natural world and the people whose lives are intimately connected with the river. In recent years, she has returned to the Thames, working for a summer as an assistant lock-keeper, and walking its length to record and respond to its landscapes, river life and river folk as a poet and photographer. Her pamphlet The Curative Harp won Ireland’s Fool for Poetry chapbook competition in 2015 and was published by Southword. The English River is her first book-length poetry collection, showing many new sides to this multi-talented artist: as poet, nature writer, storyteller and photographer. The foreword is by Pete Townshend. ‘Virginia’s story is about the river and the people who work on it, especially those who man the locks. She captures a view of the upper reaches of the River Thames that is entirely fresh. There are glimpsed moments of the claustrophobic beauty of the wooded parts that contrast with the open expanses of uplifting countryside where the river meanders through woodland and farmland. Focussing on the professionals who work on the river, and who manage the locks and the flood plains around them, Virginia suggests – as she works as a lock-keeper’s assistant – that they become almost addicted to the peace and beauty of their place of work. She herself becomes enchanted, that is certain. She makes herself vulnerable in the most romantic way, working and writing and evoking everything she sees and feels as both a storyteller and poet, and as photographer.’ – Pete Townshend, musician

Gregory Leadbetter’s first full collection of poems, The Fetch, brings together poems that reach through language to the mystery of our being, giving voice to silence and darkness, illuminating the unseen. With their own rich alchemy, these poems combine the sensuous and the numinous, the lyric and the mythic. Ranging from invocation to elegy, from ghost poems to science fiction, Leadbetter conjures and quickens the wild and the weird. His poems bring to life a theatre of awakenings and apprehensions, of births and becoming, of the natural and the transnatural, where life and death meet. Powerful, imaginative, and precisely realised, The Fetch is also poignant and humane – animated by love, alive with the forces of renewal.