Silent in Finisterre

Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, and brought up in Holland. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem 'The House' won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a book-binder in London and Norfolk. Returning to Oxford, she completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. After teaching English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then at the universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, she now teaches at Wadham College, Oxford. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her book Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), included a new collection, Eclogue Over Merlin Street (2008), together with large selections from her previous two Bloodaxe collections, A Grip on Thin Air (2000) and Icarus on Earth (2005), and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her most recent collections are Terrestrial Variations (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), and Silent in Finisterre (Bloodaxe Books, 2017).

'Jane Griffiths is a poet attracted to the cross-hatchings of matter and spirit; inner and outer; air and water; foreignness and a sense of home...she has something of the Dutch still-life painter's eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint' - Adam Thorpe, Guardian; 'For Griffiths, meaning is not so much to be teased out of the universe as it is to be seen. Her underlying conviction seems to be that, if we can eliminate our own warring needs, distractions and expectations, we can read the language of the world.' - Rose Solari, Poet Lore; 'A major achievement... outstanding...complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation' - Sarah Broom, Times Literary Supplement

• Lessons from My First Giraffe In the Beginning Perspective Exe Geography for Beginners Song of Childhood Night Drive Black Swans The Museum of Childhood Anecdote Ferryman Child at a Museum Juxtaposition Night-Watch Tremolo There's a road Like Truth Translations My Grandmother's Mirrors Troy Gone to Ground The Weather in St Just Thesaurus Anonymous What the poet is trying to say is Riddle Lifelines Five Finger Exercise Still Here Treehouse The Pond Sneyd Park Sketchbook Still Life Snapshot of a Marriage An Unwritten Novel Instead of a Mirror Domestic Science Spital Square Object Lesson Initialisation The Question of Things Not Happening