What Planet

Miriam Gamble was born in Brussels in 1980 and grew up in Belfast. She studied at Oxford and at Queen’s University Belfast, where she completed a PhD in contemporary British and Irish poetry. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2010. Her pamphlet, This Man's Town, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007. Her first book-length collection, The Squirrels Are Dead, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010 and won her a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. Her second collection, Pirate Music, was published by Bloodaxe in 2014, followed by a third collection What Planet in 2019. What Planet won the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize, Ireland's richest poetry award. She lectures in creative writing at Edinburgh University.

Gamble can be very funny as she winds up grandly rhetorical phrases for seemingly inconsequential events… The book’s best poems offset that witty, jiving, occasionally arch voice with tender, slower effects...

• 11 The Landing Window Is Unspeakable12 The Oak That Was Not There13 Time Ball14 Odradek Returns15 Wonderland16 Amethyst17 Coda21 Feria de Málaga22 Leòdhasach23 The Holy Host in Spanish Art24 Gutties25 Alchemist26 Betty Staff’s28 Feldspar30 Incident Report31 The Wits 32 Oils of Sculptors Working35 Crane Fly 36 Parotia Displaying in a Forest Clearing37 Plume38 Girl with Book and Rubber Bands40 Bloater41 Enkidu’s Worm42 Mare at Large43 Credentials44 Siete Lagunas45 Kitten49 Marine Snow50 The Canal at Fountainbridge52 Gardyloo54 Little Monument: Se Vende55 In Memoriam Your Stuff56 Urn57 Handwriting 58 Wormhole, Westlink61 In the Annum63 Abandoned Asylum64 Sometimes Nothing66 Winter Sunday67 Holograph68 Person70 In the Recliner71 Madeleine72 IndyRef, 201473 Samhain74 Moths79 Notes