To celebrate #NationalPoetryDay we’re introducing our new collections for 2024 – QuickFire, Slow Burning by Janette Ayachi, Lapwing by Hannah Copley, and Feeling All the Kills by Helen Calcutt. All are available to pre-order on our website and will be published in Spring 2024, marking 10 years of Pavilion Poetry.
QuickFire, Slow Burning moves away from the personal and delves into the universal with poems often taking flight from the page to parachute into performance. Ayachi’s hypnotic voice lifts from a keen observing stance to one that probes the chemical reactions in nature, and especially in the body. Fire is seen as an element; as something environmental, a natural disaster. But Ayachi also plays with fire as a fuel in relationships; a heat felt and subject to synergy within the cells and flesh, a cardiac pulse, a love that comes quickly and burns slowly, constantly rekindling hope for change, peace and renewal. There is a mystic undertow that exposes the materials, the lore of bones and anatomy, pilgrimages and prayers, superstitions and super galaxies that she explores with language. Lost landscapes and lost loves merge as she confronts loneliness at the same time as showing us new bloom is on the horizon – that nature will always will us another spark.
Janette Ayachi is a London-born, Edinburgh-based, Scottish-Algerian poet. She graduated with a Combined BA Honours in English Literature & Film Media from Stirling University and an MSc in Creative Writing from Edinburgh University. She’s a regular on BBC Scotland arts programmes and her work has been translated into several languages across a broad range of journals and anthologies. Her debut poetry book Hand Over Mouth Music (also Pavilion Poetry) won the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Literary Award 2019 and she is now working on her travel memoir Lonerlust. She collaborates with artists and works with poetry in public places, as well as regularly performing spoken word at festivals and events internationally.
Pre-order QuickFire, Slow Burning >
Migrating across voices and blurring the divide between bird and human, self and other, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing explores restlessness, love, and ecological and personal grief in a vivid and incantatory sequence of poems.
A lyrical biography of a bird and a fragmented study of a flawed and mutable creature bearing its name, Copley’s second collection takes inspiration from John Gower’s brid falseste of alle and its many literary guises. At the heart of the book are the shifting figures of Lapwing and Peet, two creatures whose overlapping narratives echo the double note of the bird’s cry. In Lapwing, known by countless names, migratory, and slowly disappearing beneath addiction, Copley examines a life in a slow tumble, as we are transported into a world shaped by real and imagined predators. Running alongside Lapwing is the searching voice of Peet, a daughter left to understand her father’s vanishing while trying to make a life in a habitat no longer fit for survival.
Bold, exacting, and deeply personal, Copley’s poems call out from empty nests, drained wetlands, and ploughed fields to create a soundscape of endangerment and wonder. Lapwing asks that we consider how, like the bird itself, we must all dissemble to survive.
Hannah Copley is a writer, editor and academic based in South-East England. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, and other publications and anthologies. Hannah’s first collection, Speculum, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine.
In this long-awaited full-length collection, Feeling All the Kills by Helen Calcutt exposes the distinctly connected, yet fractured selves that form as a result of sexual trauma, and what it means to be a woman living silently under this experience.
Each poem is self-enquiring and brilliant, harnessing Calcutt’s vital and breathtaking vocabulary to quietly observe the speaker, whilst allowing the physicality and rawness of the moment to live and breathe. Indeed, every moment as it’s felt, is exquisite to these pages. Scenes of extreme emotional isolation, motherly guilt, or the ache to reclaim liberty in sexuality and love, find their fractal beauty in their final, written belonging. Ruthless, dazzling, and weaving stunning musicality with frank, unhindered storytelling, these poems cast a clear eye on sexual identity, shame, and male violence, both heightened and contained within the sensory scope of the natural world, alongside a consistent depth of humanness, and nuanced linguistic precision.
Here, Calcutt reveals herself as a unique and critical voice on issues of sexual identity and womanhood. This is a collection of burning defiance and self-love, with a fierce determination to navigate a way back to a sensual, whole-feeling self. And there’s a vibrant message – ‘feel all’, so we might express ourselves to our fullest, with true authenticity and power.
Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist and choreographer based in Birmingham. Her pamphlet Somehow (Verve Poetry Press, 2020) was a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet, and Poetry School Book of the Year (longlist, 2020). Her highly acclaimed anthology, Eighty-Four (Verve, 2019) created in aid of the suicide prevention charity CALM, was a Saboteur Award shortlist, and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year (2019). Her writing has been published extensively in journals and magazines, including the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland, Wild Court and many others. She was one of six poets selected to perform as part of the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony 2022, broadcast live to over one billion people around the world. Helen was awarded an honorary doctorate by Loughborough University in December 2023 for her ‘outstanding contribution to creative writing and work in raising awareness of issues related to social inclusivity’. She is Artistic Director of ‘Beyond Words’, a ground-breaking new company exploring text-to-movement translation.
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