Amanda Dalton – författare

Stray is a book about strays -human and animal -and about straying. It''s about the lost and being lost, searching for home, and it''s about the extraordinary places we sometimes discover when we''re off the beaten track, deliberately or accidentally off-course. It''s sometimes a noun and it''s sometimes a verb -almost a command. As Allan''s mind strays and roams, he recasts himself as astronaut Buzz Aldrin. He may be lost in space, but he has an amazing time up there! A feral child becomes a dog to find her way back home. Medea fetches up in Sheffield, semi-wild, living in a van with a goat on a rope. She''s washing dishes in a Sheffield pub when in walks footballer Jason… Cesare the somnambulist has lost himself in sleep. It''s only when he falls from the path and is dying that he can wake… In many of these poems objects matter. They are the things we think with, we remember with them, they confirm or reduce us. Sometimes they help to identify who or where we are. Often they''re broken, or themselves lost, separated from their home or from each other: the letter, torn and scattered, the diminishing number of objects on a mother''s table, a museum''s broken and displaced treasures.

A child travels down her own oesophagus, a woman joins a search party to look for herself, one grief-stricken soul descends into a watery underworld whilst another experiences love as demonic possession…. By turns wryly humorous, tender and heartbroken, Fantastic Voyage takes us on journeys into our hidden and ghostly selves, our insides and our ‘other’, exploring the myriad ways in which the human body gives voice to unspeakable truths.These poems put us in and alongside bodies that are ill, out of control and inhabited - our dark innards as harbingers of secrets and fears, the gut as fortune-teller and home to ghosts. The book's central long poem – a meditation on water – charts a deeply personal voyage through grief and loss. Two contrasting voices attempt to navigate a devastated world as both a corporeal and visceral experience, one grounded, the other hallucinatory. In other dreamlike experiences, the poems glimpse absent bodies as apparitions, doppelgängers and hauntings, and our visible selves as beings we cannot always recognise.

How to Disappear shines a torch into the dark corners and finds a world inhabited by the missing and the dead, by monsters and wounded beasts, discarded dreams and the memories of strangers – a trawl through the apparently empty spaces and what might be found there. At its heart is the narrative sequence Room of Leaves. It is 1959. Grace, at last, falls in love. Jilted at the altar, she sets up home in the garden of her mother’s bungalow and waits, for thirty years, in a world of birds and bright umbrellas, for Frank to return…

"Stray" is a book about strays - human and animal - and about straying. It's about the lost and being lost, searching for home, and it's about the extraordinary places we sometimes discover when we're off the beaten track, deliberately or accidentally off-course. It's sometimes a noun and it's sometimes a verb - almost a command. As Allan's mind strays and roams, he recasts himself as astronaut Buzz Aldrin. He may be lost in space, but he has an amazing time up there! A feral child becomes a dog to find her way back home. Medea fetches up in Sheffield, semi-wild, living in a van with a goat on a rope. She's washing dishes in a Sheffield pub when in walks footballer Jason - Cesare the somnambulist has lost himself in sleep. It's only when he falls from the path and is dying that he can wake - In many of these poems objects matter. They are the things we think with, we remember with them, they confirm or reduce us. Sometimes they help to identify who or where we are. Often they're broken, or themselves lost, separated from their home or from each other: the letter, torn and scattered, the diminishing number of objects on a mother's table, a museum's broken and displaced treasures.

In 2020, Amanda Dalton participated – for the second year running – in National Poetry Writing Month, a project that challenges the public to write a poem every day throughout the month of April. Each midnight, new instructions are posted informing participants what they should write about in the next 24 hours – anything from an ode to life’s small pleasures to a concrete poem, to a poem from the viewpoint of a figure in Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. This chapbook contains the unedited versions of the thirty poems that Amanda wrote. By turns witty (often very funny), clever, moving and erudite, this short collection represents an astonishing achievement by an outstanding writer.