A Pair of Three

Claire Crowther's fifth collection, A Pair of Three, is her most personal yet, a story of marriage to a widower. It explores a trio, wife, husband and first wife, in a love story that is moving, uplifting, often funny but rarely told. The emotional power of lyric, the narrative of ballad and the drama of modernist poems are all displayed in this distinctive sequence. Claire Crowther's previous collection, Solar Cruise, was widely praised and awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her first collection, Stretch of Closures, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize. She is Deputy Editor of Long Poem Magazine, teaches creative writing at Oxford University, and lives in Somerset.

Reviews of Solar Cruise

"Claire Crowther mosaics together poetic and scientific discourse to create new adventures in thought ... These poems perpetually test the ability of science language to infiltrate the lyric, to begin to make another kind of sense to that which hard science requires. ... There's a problem here - a gap in public understanding - and in that void, Crowther's poems dance and glow. ... Crowther's poems are fizzily cerebral, wordplay-avid, both sensuous and ratiocinative: 'I write crosswise. I experiment with words'." -Vidyan Ravinthiran

"This outstanding collection reads as a profound love poem, a generous gift from an inquisitive poet to her bright and devoted physicist partner in a lucid relationship filled with creativity, mutual appreciation and respect. It is a brilliant journey that takes the reader to unexpected and exhilarating places." -Leo Boix

"Claire Crowther's new collection, Solar Cruise, is a brilliant complete journal of the anger felt by those of us staring the heat-death of the planet in the face while the markets busy themselves elsewhere. Set within the love story between a poet and a physicist who specialises in solar technology, Crowther's book is an increasingly blinding statement of hard facts and deep feeling. ... Crowther is perhaps the first climate poet to demonstrate, in a book-length execution, that the poetry needed is not simply a recasting of the pastoral and natural, but a pulsing, vivid writing of knowledge, with poetry and science codependent and coexpressive. Fusion, in a word, which will save us both here and beyond, if enough people speak like this." -Patrick Davidson Roberts

"It struck me as remarkable that a collection with such a powerful and deeply-felt message never sounded like preaching. Indeed my memories of it - apart from the wry humour of the 'rapture physicists' and the ship's foghorn that goes 'ohhhm, ohhhm' - are principally of excitement, the excitement that comes from thinking about something new. I'm not surprised this book netted a Poetry Book Society recommendation."

Sheenagh Pugh