Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726433
Publication date: October 18, 2021
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781781726440
Publication date: October 18, 2021
Price: £7.99
“Heartwrenching. They flinch and unflinch like Northern Lights – fierce and very beautiful – these flexings of the human spirit above a raw and changing world.” – Jen Hadfield
We Have to Leave the Earth by Carolyn Jess-Cooke is both keenly political and deeply personal. The opening poem ‘now’ features a seemingly peaceful domestic scene of a family lounging at home as the starting point for meditation on history, time, mortality and the fate of the planet: ‘I think of what tomorrow asks and what is yet / to be done and undone, how many nows make up a life / and what is living’. There are hints of a struggle with depression stemming from a difficult childhood. There is a cherished child diagnosed with autism. There are two sequences: ‘Songs for the Arctic’, inspired by field work done for the Arctic at the Thought Foundation, poems that are vividly descriptive of an extreme landscape, aware of the fraught history of exploration and sensitive to the way changes in the pack ice are the most significant indicators of man-made global warming. The other sequence, ‘The House of Rest’, is a history in nine poems of Josephine Butler (1828-1906), who pioneered feminist activism, and helped to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act 1869, which facilitated sexual violence in the name of disease prevention. Jess-Cooke is unafraid of dark material but is also ultimately hopeful and full of creative strategies to meet challenging times.
Carolyn Jess-Cooke
Carolyn Jess-Cooke was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her PhD resulted in her first book, Shakespeare and Film, and kicked off an early career in academia. She is currently Senior Lecturer and Programme Convenor for the MLitt Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Carolyn’s first poetry collection, Inroads (Seren) received a Northern Writers Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie prize, an Arts Council Award, and was shortlisted for the New London Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 2010. Her second collection BOOM! explores her experiences of motherhood and received a K Blundell award from the Society of Authors and a Northern Writers Award. She edited the bestselling anthology Writing Motherhood.
Carolyn has a prestigious parallel career as a novelist. Her first novel The Guardian Angel’s Journal was published in 23 languages and was an international bestseller, her subsequent titles: The Boy Who Could See Demons, I Know My Name, and The Blame Game all did very well. The last two sold as film/TV options. Her novel, The Nesting, set in Norway, was published Harper Collins/Random House in 2020. Her most recent novel The Light House Witches was published with HarperCollins in 2021.
“
From the personal to the global, Jess-Cooke deftly draws our concerns in line with her own, providing visually-rich word-paintings that tell us not only the facts as she observes them, but cutting us cleanly to the emotional quick. The scope of the writing is humbling and hopeful. This is a collection full of reverence for our planet, and our humanity – an urging to take stock and take action to do all we can to preserve them.”
Judy Darley, SkyLightRain
“This collection is both highly personal and preoccupied with global issues… This is not a cheerful collection, but it nevertheless seeks to offer solace. Comfort is to be found in human connection, particularly that of motherhood, even if it is often fringed with grief and anxiety.”
Chris Cusack, The Poetry Review
“Immediately, the poet meshes the globally catastrophic with the intensely personal, recognising fears and identifying responsibilities… I cannot say enough about this significant collection. I can only urge you to read it.”
Beth McDonough, DURA
“This collection shakes a reader insistently by the shoulders, tenderly and with eloquent persistence… Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poetry is masterly… I feel privileged to have reviewed this collection. Should a paper label adorn this book, it would instruct us to read me, read me again and understand.”
Julie Hogg, London Grip
“The personal and political convene in Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s latest poetry collection, We Have to Leave the Earth. An exploration of climate change, motherhood, and feminism told in four distinct parts, this work of poetry is far reaching in its scope and beautiful in its eloquence… With an eye to the next generation and duty of care we owe them, We Have to Leave the Earth is a collection that speaks for the fate of the world through the lens of womanhood.”
Wales Arts Review
“From the personal to the global, Jess-Cooke deftly draws our concerns in line with her own, providing visually-rich word-paintings that tell us not only the facts as she observes them, but cutting us cleanly to the emotional quick. The scope of the writing is humbling and hopeful. This is a collection full of reverence for our planet, and our humanity – an urging to take stock and take action to do all we can to preserve them.”
Judy Darley, SkyLightRain
“We Have to Leave the Earth is Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s third collection and her experience shows. She uses white space on the page like no one else… These are deeply affecting poems…”
Caroline Bracken, Nation.Cymru
“…there is no shying away by this poet as she bears witness to our ravaging of the Arctic and of each other, and various forms of violence. Amidst the brutality, however, there is beauty, and the grisly and grim are very often transmuted to something more refined, even rather spiritual, through the writer’s fine, lucid language… The result is poems that are strong, yet empathetic; steely, but compassionate. It’s an extremely powerful admixture and I urge you to read it.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
“…a skillful collection that suggests the reader be present in the moment and vividly experience our world as it is now, both domestic and political. The poems are those moments in dreams where the dreamer becomes lucid and sees things as they really are, like the slap of ice-cold air… awakens the reader and defines the whole collection.”
Ruth Stacey
“Carolyn Jess-Cooke, whose gifts were apparent in her previous two collections, is at her best in We Have To Leave The Earth. Four distinct projects are constructed with imagination, clarity, tenderness, melody and skill. The poet’s deeply curious mind resists hierarchy: the personal is political, historical, environmental and cosmic. The Arctic sequence has the distilled imagistic sensibility of Lorine Niedecker; and is, for those of us who will never journey there, a means of travel and comprehension. Whether her subject is feminism, ecology, star systems, parenthood or disability, Jess-Cooke offers a kind of ‘translation’ or ekphrasis that she – with her generous perceptions and crystalline writing – is uniquely equipped for.”
Kathryn Maris
