Miriam Gamble - Böcker

Miriam Gamble's second collection takes its title from unlicensed broadcasting. Here, the marginalia of prophecy coexist with and counter voices of authority, voices that are at once eerie and depressingly recognisable. An artist steals back paintings, leaving the money in their wake, and scores a cameo on Crimewatch; a figure from medieval memento mori art finds himself up against a consumer deaf to the language of symbolism; animal anti-heroes spit in the face of well-meaning, or not so well-meaning, human interest. Throughout, biological impulses are sparked then thwarted by entropic systems - creatures and humans alike find themselves steered rather than steering, engulfed by repeating patterns which nullify the efforts of the individual life. Pirate Music questions the narratives, including those forged by art itself, by which we shape the world to suit our own devices and steel ourselves against 'what we cannot name or see'.

The poems in Miriam Gamble’s third collection journey surreally through scenes and landscapes at once of the world and of the mind, finding little, as they go, that 'can be claimed self-evident'. By turns uncanny, dark, poignant and uproarious, What Planet sets the individuality of perception and the inventiveness of memory against fixed certainties, probing chaos and madness in a post-truth world. Rhythmically propulsive and dizzyingly inter-connective, Gamble’s new work is as formally adventurous as it is conceptually distinctive, stretching syntax, jumbling the solid and spectral, crossing borders of time and space. Yet this is also a collection pained by loss, and passionate to connect with a life’s 'vacated' corners – even if the act of remembering is as much creation as recovery. Winner of the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize.