Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 140
ISBN: 9781854115201
Publication date: September 1, 2010
Price: £9.99
Anne-Marie Fyfe – as is apparent in her Understudies: New and Selected Poems – is a subtle and engaging poet. She has developed much like a painter, spare themes moving towards a deeper complexity. Her earlier work includes quite a few domestic interiors; rooms recalled from an Irish childhood and stories told by parents and grandparents. Later poems often feature crucial or pivotal moments in her life and the imagined lives of others: a significant conversation, the look a woman gives herself in the mirror when she’s about to leave her husband, the odour left in the air by a certain perfume. All this eventually evolves into her characteristic poem, a cityscape wrought with careful observation and melded with flashbacks of memory, both her own and including her family, and others, beautifully imagined. Her voice is direct, with a conversational tone that invites you into the narrative. This volume includes selections from her previous books: Late Crossing (1999), Tickets from a Blank Window (2002) – both from Rockingham Press, and The Ghost Twin (Peterloo, 2005).
Anne-Marie Fyfe
Born in Cushendall, County Antrim, Anne-Marie Fyfe lives in London where she has run Coffee-House Poetry’s readings & classes at London’s leading live literature venue, the Troubadour in Earls Court since 1997, created the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, is Poetry Co-ordinator for the annual John Hewitt International Summer School in Armagh, & is former Chair of the Poetry Society. Her distinctive themed creative-writing workshops have inspired writers at festivals, writers’ groups, universities & colleges throughout Britain & Ireland over many years &, over the past 10 years in particular, in Europe (on annual residential writing courses) & in the USA on her reading/workshopping tour each spring. Her latest publication, No Far Shore: Charting Unknown Waters, was written on an 18-month journey around the coasts of Britain & Ireland &, on the Atlantic’s farther shores, the US’s North-Eastern coastal states & Nova Scotia in Canada. She has published five poetry collections including House of Small Absences (Seren).
