Slant Light

In her first full-length collection, Sarah Westcott immerses the human self in the natural world, giving voice to a remarkable range of flora and fauna so often silenced or unheard. Here, the voiceless speaks, laments and sings - from the fresh voice of a spring wood to a colony of bats or a grove of ancient sequioa trees. Unafraid of using scientific language and teamed with a clear eye, Westcott's poems are drawn directly from the natural world, questioning ideas of the porosity of boundaries between the human and non-human and teeming with detail. A series of lyrical charms inspired by Anglo-Saxon texts draw on the specificity of the botanical and its spoken heritage, suggesting a relevance that resonates today. Westcott's poems are alive to the beautiful in the commonplace and offer up a precise honouring of the wild, while retaining a deeply-felt sense of connection with a planet in peril.


Author: Sarah Westcott
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 09/01/2016
Pages: 65
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.15lbs
Size: 7.30h x 4.40w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781781382929

About the Author

Sarah Westcott's debut collection Slant Light, Pavilion Poetry, was Highly Commended in the 2017 Forward Prizes. Her pamphlet Inklings, published by Flipped Eye, was a winner of the Venture Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society's Pamphlet Choice. Sarah's poems have appeared in magazines including Poetry Review, POEM, Magma and Butcher's Dog, on beermats, billboards and buses, and in anthologies including Best British Poetry The Forward Book of Poetry and Staying Human (Bloodaxe, 2020).

Sarah was a poet-in-residence at the Bethnal Green Nature Reserve in London and Manchester Cathedral poet of the year in 2016. Recent awards are the London Magazine poetry prize and the Manchester Cathedral prize. She was a news journalist for twenty years and now teaches poetry at City Lit in London.



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