Pier 52

Jane Duran was born in Cuba and raised in the USA and Chile. In 1995, Enitharmon published her first full collection, Breathe Now, Breathe which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Enitharmon also published four subsequent collections, including Coastal (2005) and Graceline (2010) which were both PBS Recommendations. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2005. Together with Gloria Garcia Lorca, she translated Lorca's Gypsy Ballads (Enitharmon, 2011), and his Sonnets of Dark Love and The Tamarit Divan (Enitharmon, 2017). Her collection the clarity of distant things was published by Carcanet in 2021.

'Reading this collection is to resensitise our senses of vision and poise. Duran is a guide with the gift of communicating wonder as well as contemplation, starting us off with meditations on the eery spaces - and almost euphoric beams of light - created by much-missed artist Matta-Clark. As the poems proceed so the reader walks from wharf to city block and out and up to trees (where their metaphoric dance is matched by actual contemporary dance). Gradually piers and bridges, the means of connecting us all, give way to something much more sinister: the Israeli walls put up in Palestine. Even here Duran finds joy, moving from the thought-provoking conceptual art of the first half of the book to the warmth of documentary video in the second. She watches with us, evoking the jeopardy and sheer joy of young Palestinians leaping up and onto the architecture which was meant to constrain them. This is a book for our times.'Richard Price