Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 86
ISBN: 9781781725672
Publication date: March 31, 2020
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 86
ISBN: 9781781725689
Publication date: March 31, 2020
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Katherine Stansfield has made a name for herself both as a wryly witty poet of the everyday seen ‘aslant’ and as a popular novelist of crime and fantasy. Her second poetry collection, We Could Be Anywhere by Now, is pointedly full of poems about placement and displacement. After a childhood on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, she moved to mid Wales, and this book explores relationships between these two places along personal and linguistic lines, as well as notions of insider / outsider in Wales and England, learning languages, and the languages of learning to leave places behind. New horizons beckon: we voyage to Italy, Canada, the United States. Stansfield is never eager to pronounce but always approaches her subjects in an oblique, artful way, carefully avoiding cliché and relishing the strange, the overheard, the marginal, the accidental comedy and tragedy of the everyday.
You can watch Katherine read her poem ‘Talk of her’ below:
Katherine Stansfield
Katherine Stansfield grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. Her poems have appeared in The North, Magma, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter’s House, And Other Poems, Butcher’s Dog, and as ‘Poem of the Week’ in The Guardian. Her second collection We Could Be Anywhere By Now is available now; the book was supported by a bursary from Literature Wales. She teaches for the Open University and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She also writes novels.
“To read her is to be submerged in her experiences, to be offered a portal into someone else’s sensibility.”
Thomas Tyrell, Wales Arts Review
“Here is carefully considered, accessible writing; simultaneously instinctual and reasoned,. It is often a juxtaposition of logic, lucidity and inexorable truth, intuition and overheard hearsay: however never ambiguous. Each poem has a crystal clear rationale and the author’s voice is confident and cogent.”
Julie Hogg, London Grip
plenty to admire in Stansfield’s poems which exhibit a quirky sense of humour and demonstrate considerable inventiveness that will delight many a reader of her work.
Neil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud
‘Katherine Stansfield’s imagination uses logic and rhythm to push her poems into surprise. She dares to tackle one of the ultimate questions: daring to make a new home. Generously, her poems provide beautiful refuge for her readers.’
Gwyneth Lewis
‘Katherine Stansfield writes poems that test language and our place in it, and show how the words that help us anchor ourselves in can suddenly cut us adrift. Perhaps that’s why, whatever her subject, her words are so well-chosen, the tones so deftly-handled. These poems are multi-layered and full of surprising transitions: we never quite feel at home in them, yet wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.’
Patrick McGuiness
