Tethers

American expatriate Carrie Etter has published four collections of poetry, including The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Prize, and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She also edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), a TLS Book of the Year, and Linda Lamus’s posthumous collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). Individual poems have appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, The New Statesman, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, Poetry Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. She also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and has received grants from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. After many years teaching at Bath Spa University, in 2022 Etter joined the creative writing faculty at the University of Bristol.

Many contemporary poets blow away in the gale of nihil and nonsense that life is becoming, but some still try to weather it - Carrie Etter is one of the few to have found strong roots to cling to, and one of the very few in whose lines one can discern the flesh-and-blood figure of a witness wholly alive, alert to the evidence, unsparing but unjudging, getting it down by heart. Sorrowing, glad, graceful, The Tethers is a rich and significant debut.A" - Glyn Maxwell The Tethers is full of highly intelligent, often finely cadenced and in the best sense measured poetry. Carrie Etter deftly fuses accents of modern America and England with a strong sense of the Classics. Nuanced, lyrical, occasionally humorous, these poems reveal time after time an acute sense of 'the rise and fall of what we cannot moor'." - Robert Crawford " You have to listen very hard to Etter's subtleties, and then your own answering imagination repays you." Warwick Review [H]ers is an assured, confident voice.A" The North 44 [T]he inventive image-making that suffuses Etter's writing is [ - ] accompanied by a perceptive clarity of thought, threaded through a concise, fluid style capable of addressing a range of subjects while still sounding wholly individual. [ - ] Etter's real talent [ - ] lies in her ability to immerse the reader in - rather than merely convey - the sensory experience of a poem. [ - ] The Tethers marks the arrival of an original talent, and is surely one of the most ambitious and accomplished first collections of recent years.A" Times Literary Supplement