If not for that warning, how else might we react to:įloods are alluded to in a subtle tap. Immediately after the poor start, ‘You/balance your breath like a bowl of dry/ice’ and subconsciously our own breathing prepares itself for the rest of the poem. Merwin and Stephen Dobyns, ‘Nightrunning’ takes the reader to a place where only the most introspective of poets can tunnel their way to. One will also understand why So Many Moving Parts has also won a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and will go on to win plenty more awards.Īlthough all at once reminding of several American Bloodaxe poets, most notably W.S. But, certainly, not much thought could have gone into describing the darkness above the harbour: Er, fishy? That will do.Īfter that, clichés are thrown out of the window and, in this poem (‘Nightrunning’) alone, one witnesses a turnaround so unexpected (expected, if the reader is familiar with Atkinson’s work) that, even before the second page, we know we are reading the work of a genius. Other readers will have their own pet hates when it comes to certain words or images in poems. Any poem with the word moon in it is enough to put me on red alert. Yet her third book, So Many Moving Parts, begins with a sentence a child might have come up with. Atkinson appeared in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets, before her second collection, Catulla et al, a TLS Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) in 2012.
Her first collection, Kink and Particle, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and won the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, as well as being shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. On reading the first three lines of the first poem of Tiffany Atkinson’s new collection, you might be left wondering what all the fuss is about.
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