Sarah Corbett – författare

A soul’s journey through the night, a missing woman: time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms and voices to make one story of love and loss. In And She Was Corbett combines the fictional spell-making of Haruki Murakami, with the filmic neo-noir of Atom Egoyan (Exotica) and David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), to push the boundaries of poetic genre, asking us to renegotiate the way we encounter and reconfigure ourselves through trauma, in desire, or as we seek to reassemble ourselves and our past.November, 3am, and two young lovers are about to meet on the Heathrow Express.A side street in an unknown city: Felix Morning wakes with no memory. In his pocket is a membership card for a nightclub, The Bunker. With the help of the beautiful Flick, he must recover what he has lost.Deep into a dangerous love affair, Esther and Iain believe the other can replace what they each have lost – a heart, a gift – but is Esther’s price too high for Iain to pay, and can their love survive?Who is Esther, where has she come from, and what has she got to do with the woman in the labyrinth? Does Flick belong to the past or to the future? What is memory, and what remains of us without it?And She Was demands our attention, its startling and dazzling writing asking us to be carried away as we read, but returning us by its end to a place both resolved and transformed.

Walking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett’s fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence – part found poem, part assemblage – draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights – a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child – attempt to balance the darkness.

Self and history collide, selves fracture, the flag is divided, monuments collapse. In her sixth collection, Sarah Corbett considers the fragments we might hold against dissolution, whether personal, national, or global. Midnight in Leningrad, 1940, Anna Akhmatova waits for a poem to arrive, in her hand an egg; on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a writer recalls her breakdown as a student in 1989. In the pandemic year an isolated artist communes with a tree; visitors to an art gallery are led on a journey of rebirth; missives find their way back to us from a flooded world. The book opens with an invocation to the goddess Ishtar, and closes with the goddess rising from a spring thirty years in the future, ‘the world’s unspoken desire’ to be reborn. A series of ekphrastic ‘interventions’ respond to 20th century European cinema, the work of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, and consider what art can offer in face of the predicaments we find ourselves in. Summoning the ‘Red horse of time, white horse of poetry, blue horse of dreams,’ poetry’s answer is the search for connection, love; and for presence, where we might meet each other, transcendent.

Sarah Corbett is less interested in the everyday aspects of reality than in "what moves beneath the surface of my own, and others' experience." This infuses her poems with mystery and with the intent of discovery. They resound with atmosphere and frequently invoke images from the natural world. Two notable themes (each with a series of poems) recur. The first is based on the author's experience of her mother's absence as a young child. In some poems the mother appears like a benevolent ghost, a figure the protagonist is "always waiting for," in others she is more ambiguous, or even "an imposter." The second major series derives from the author's childhood in rural Wales and her particular fascination for horses. Horses appear in both the actual and imaginative senses, as icons for strength, freedom and unbridled erotic energy.

From the first sumptuous poem, 'Birthday' where the protagonist, running at night, thinks of her body as a 'nocturnal bloom', the reader is immersed in the compelling voice of Sarah Corbett. From her first book, The Red Wardrobe, nominated for both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prize, we are familiar with the world she portrays, of the childhood spent in rural North Wales, and the first half of this new collection is devoted mostly to poems that re-create scenes from a youth that was haunted by trouble, but also redeemed by a strong attachment to the beauties of nature, particularly horses, and an early love of reading and culture. In poems like 'Rivers, Roads' the two images mesh and intertwine, becoming symbolic and strangely evocative.This poet bravely eschews lightness and irony for a whole-heartedly passionate and intensely physical response to life. Other Beasts differs from her earlier work in that in the latter half of the collection, she moves away from her own personal history and focuses on in-depth and often scary narratives of other lives. In these poems, she closely identifies with survivors of trauma, in this case the horror of a small girl hiding in a trunk while her family is massacred in a war-torn country. In the long poem 'Testimony' she inhabits the voice of Joanne Lees, the woman at the centre of the famously controversial case in Australia where her partner, Peter Falconio, was murdered and she managed, although tied up, to escape into the bush. Another sequence, 'Cuttings' weaves a week's worth of international press cuttings together,creating an alternately horrible, sad, funny and odd tapestry of events."In its slow build toward Gothicism, our dark selves are dug up like buried corpses. Draw the curtains, invite the cat in and start at the beginning." Poetry WalesSarah Corbett was born in Chester, raised in north Wales, and educated at the Universities of Leeds and East Anglia. This is her third book of poems, following the acclaimed The Red Wardrobe (1998) and The Witch Bag (2002). She has published her poems in a wide selection of magazines and anthologies and has read her work at festivals internationally.