Slant Light

Sarah Westcott’s debut collection Slant Light, Pavilion Poetry, was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize and her pamphlet Inklings was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Sarah’s poems have appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, POEM, Magma and Poetry Birmingham, on beermats, billboards and buses, and in anthologies including Best British Poetry, The Forward Book of Poetry and Staying Human. Sarah was a news journalist for twenty years and now teaches poetry at City Lit in London and elsewhere. She has a lifelong interest in the natural world and is currently working on a collection of fragments inspired by a small, newly-dug garden pond. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion, was published in 2022.

Reviews'I have been waiting eagerly for a full collection from Sarah Westcott. Now it is here I am dazzled. So imaginative are the poems in Slant Light it's as if she pulls her language from a fantastical place; Westcott takes us deep into the natural world, makes us understand its physical urgency, ‘the insistence of air’. She has a microscopic eye. Everything we encounter here – the bat, the mole, the hare, the flower – is so finely described, things rise up from the page. This is not just a book of poems, it is a book of rich, exquisite shapes, providing a new understanding of how ‘we sense the bright world’.'Rebecca Goss

• BatsInklingsSpring WoodFormDowny MildewMiliaFor the Love of Young LeafFlowersLilyThe Mariposa TreesFallen MonarchThe Faithful CoupleWawona Tunnel TreeThe Vegetable LambGreen GiantThe Great Pacific Garbage PatchSentinelLambskinLittle RedPox CharmCharm for Delayed BirthCharm for a Lost ChildHare Mass Messenger May Still Life Sculpting a Mole The Cannots The Green Flash And then he started singing again Charm Against a Wen Black and Blue Cannibal Eyas Oxygen Owls We are listening Afterlife cloud Notes and Acknowledgements