Zoe Brigley – författare

Zoë Brigley’s third collection Hand & Skull draws on early memories of the Welsh landscape and the harshness of rural life as well as on her later immersion in the American landscape and her perception of a sense of hollowness in particular communities there. Other strands include the horror of violence, especially violence towards women, contrasted with poems which offer comfort by working as beatitudes or commentaries on life as it exists now, seeking a way of being that is more beautiful, often in relation to her children. There are also epistolary poems, letters to or from real, imagined and remembered women like the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

This landmark anthology, 100 Poems to Save the Earth, presents a positive and determined impulse to change for the better how human beings interact with the environment.These imaginative, questing poems reveal our crisis as fundamentally a crisis of perception. We can no longer view Earth as a collection of resources to be exploited but must see it as the living web of connections and relationships that it is.The voices gathered call for ecological justice, an ethics of care for the earth and for each other. The eclectic mix of poets – rural and urban – link issues of social injustice and the need to protect the environment, emphasizing a sweeping urgency. The time for awareness building is over. This anthology, with its incisive Foreword, is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have.Poetry has the power to inspire thought and action. As these poems show, it speaks directly but is the opposite of simplistic; it can be subtle and allusive, consoling or incendiary. And it can play a part in saving the earth.'This compelling suite of poems is a timely reminder to cherish, to celebrate. What could be more enjoyable than beautiful poems about this beautiful planet? This collection is immediate, moving, wise and unforgettable as it is unputdownable!' – Daljit Nagra'These achingly beautiful poems, from a range of stellar talents, animate and explore the sometimes-frayed connection we have with our precious planet and remind us how to refind ourselves amid the landscape we call home'– Sonya Huber'Neither one hundred nor one billion poems will save the planet, but it is an absolute necessity for poets to celebrate our world and engage with its future. This is a marvellous compendium to show how they are attempting this…' – Robert Minhinnick

"The Secret" is a book of mystery and magic. Opening on familiar ground - retelling stories from the Bible, Celtic mythology, small-town rumours and urban mythologies - it gradually moves beyond its borders to narratives of Central America, drawing on figures such as the Spanish conquistador, Hernan Cortes, and the Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo. In this unusually innovative first collection, Zoe Brigley considers many secrets - between man and woman, mother and daughter, teacher and pupil, rich and poor, North and South, familiar and strange. Using a large variety of poetic forms, her writing oscillates between global languages and minor ways of speaking. The book is split into three sections that spiral further away from ideas of home towards the discovery of gifts in other cultures.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Moving from the violent to the erotic, "Conquest" describes women questing to rediscover their own desire. Split into three sections, the collection begins in the 19th-century England of the Bronte sisters, travels through the vast continent of the USA, and finally finds the answer to women's longing in a walled garden in the decorous city of Paris. In America and Europe, the heroines struggle against the conquest of bodies and of place, facing issues like miscarriage, lost love and domestic violence. Consolation comes, however, by discovering their own desires and independence. The collection begins with 'My Last Rochester', a sequence devoted to the Bronte sisters and their struggle to meet expectations of them as women, lovers and wives. The English Gothic gives way later to a story of American immigration in the title-sequence. 'Conquest' pans to the wide open spaces of the USA, where pioneering women still quest to satisfy the sweetness of their own longings. Such satisfaction is only unravelled by retreating to a walled garden in the final sequence, 'The Lady and the Unicorn'. Original in its use of form, "Conquest" questions the brutal aspects of Western society, especially violence against women and the colonial mind-set. Inspired by the tapestries at the Musee Cluny in Paris and the artwork of Victoria Brookland, the poems visualise women rediscovering their own pleasures, desires, loves. Bridging the personal and the universal, Conquest offers a compelling vision of healing and consolation.