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.

'Invoking the sinister, slanted light of Emily Dickinson's poem, in her first full-length collection Sarah Westcott casts her eye on a world teeming with organisms at once organic, artificial and mystical. Rooted in the natural world, the poems are concerned with the frail membranes that partition plant from animal matter, perfectly embodied in the image of 'The Vegetable Lamb' - mythological plant believed to bear sheep as fruit. Revealing how firmly the spores of the ancient natural world are embedded in the contemporary, the collection is also a stark reminder of a world 'quietly consuming itself'.'Poetry Book Society

• Bats Inklings Spring Wood Form Downy Mildew Milia For the Love of Young Leaf Flowers Lily The Mariposa Trees Fallen Monarch The Faithful Couple Wawona Tunnel Tree The Vegetable Lamb Green Giant The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Sentinel Lambskin Little Red Pox Charm Charm for Delayed Birth Charm for a Lost Child Hare 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