Our three new collections from Pavilion Poetry are now available: Wilder by Jemma Borg, Hiding to Nothing by Anita Pati, and The Room Between Us by Denise Saul!
What is still wild in us – and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg’s second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante’s forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to ‘break ourselves each against the beauty of the other’.
Jemma Borg won the inaugural Ginkgo Prize in 2018 and The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Competition in 2017. Recent publications include the TLS, The Poetry Review and Oxford Poetry, and anthologies such as Out of Time (Valley Press 2021) and Places of Poetry (Oneworld 2020), and her first collection, The illuminated world (Eyewear, 2014), won the Fledgling Award and the New Writing Ventures Award for Poetry. She was a zoologist and evolutionary geneticist before working in scientific research management in the voluntary sector and in science publishing.
Read our interview with Jemma and listen to her read from ‘Wilder’>
Anita Pati’s debut collection Hiding to Nothing explores the destabilising effects of violence, particularly empire’s aftermath, on a psyche. Threaded with internal dialogue, this multi-layered work witnesses how unbelonging can unsettle perceptions of the brown female body within an unwelcoming, even hostile, environment.
Anita Pati was born and raised in an English northern coastal town and currently lives in London. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Dodo Provocateur, won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition (2019) and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets. She has been a Jerwood/Arvon mentee, an Aldeburgh Eight participant, a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and a joint winner of the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize (2018/20). Anita has worked variously in journalism and libraries.
Read our interview with Anita and listen to her read from ‘Hiding to Nothing’>
In her debut collection The Room Between Us, Denise Saul explores family and identity as she tells the story of a mother’s illness and subsequent aphasia, and a daughter’s ongoing role as carer. At the heart of their relationship is an awareness of the inadequacies of language to name painful experiences as together they start to know the world afresh. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Summer 2022.
Denise Saul is the author of two pamphlets. White Narcissi (Flipped Eye Publishing) was Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and House of Blue (Rack Press) was PBS Pamphlet Recommendation. She is the recipient of Poetry Book Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and Fellow of The Complete Works. Denise holds a PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from University of Roehampton. She was awarded Arts Council England’s Grant for the Arts Award, for the delivery of her video poem collaborative project, Silent Room: A Journey of Language. Her project can be found at http://www.silent-room.net.
Read our interview with Denise and listen to her read from ‘The Room Between Us’>
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