To celebrate #NationalPoetryDay we’re introducing our new collections for 2025 – Archivum by Theresa Muñoz, The Ishtar Gate by Sarah Corbett, and The Lives of Z by Olivia McCannon. All three are now available to pre-order on our website and will be published in Spring 2025.
Archivum is a book – wise, funny and inventive by turn – that explores what it means to look at artefacts in an archive, and how these objects resonate with events in our lives. Imagined as a walk across Edinburgh, landmarks such as the Balmoral clock, National Library of Scotland, Meadows, Canongate Kirkyard and Water of Leith provide a meditative backdrop to the poems.
The archives – in particular the archive of the writer Muriel Spark – are used to create a space to come to terms with the complexities of a life and how we in turn tell stories about ourselves: the depths of our familial relationships, relationship breakdowns and the death of a parent. What’s found in the archive’s boxes — including recipes, telegrams, letters — stirs and amplifies feelings of belonging, disorientation, triumph and grief.
With a focus on women writers and mixed-race relationships, the book explores objects belonging to significant figures in the poet’s imaginary: along with Spark, the actor Maggie Smith, poet Elizabeth Bishop, the 19th century slave owner’s daughter Eliza Junor, psychotherapist Marie Battle Singer, as well as the lives of women of colour in Scotland.
Theresa Muñoz was born in Vancouver, Canada and lives in Edinburgh. She has received a Muriel Spark Centenary Award, Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, Creative Scotland grant and shortlisted for The Kavya Prize and a Sky Arts Royal Society of Literature Writers Award. She is Director of the Newcastle Poetry Festival at Newcastle University.
Self and history collide, selves fracture, the flag is divided, monuments collapse. In her sixth collection, Sarah Corbett considers the fragments we might hold against dissolution, whether personal, national, or global. Midnight in Leningrad, 1940, Anna Akhmatova waits for a poem to arrive, in her hand an egg; on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a writer recalls her breakdown as a student in 1989. In the pandemic year an isolated artist communes with a tree; visitors to an art gallery are led on a journey of rebirth; missives find their way back to us from a flooded world. The Ishtar Gate opens with an invocation to the goddess Ishtar, and closes with the goddess rising from a spring thirty years in the future, ‘the world’s unspoken desire’ to be reborn. A series of ekphrastic ‘interventions’ respond to 20th century European cinema, the work of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, and consider what art can offer in face of the predicaments we find ourselves in. Summoning the ‘Red horse of time, white horse of poetry, blue horse of dreams,’ poetry’s answer is the search for connection, love; and for presence, where we might meet each other, transcendent.
Sarah Corbett has published five collections of poetry, including A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry, 2018), and the verse-novel And She Was (Pavilion Poetry, 2015). She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for Lancaster University and lives in Hebden Bridge.
Olivia McCannon’s latest collection is shot through with questions. How ecological is English? How do you read an unreadable world, or a transforming planet?
The Lives of Z is an inventory of poem-artefacts gleaned from the spoilheaps of a speculative future. Each ‘find’ emerges with the randomness of any archaeological discovery, in that moment when its significance hangs in the air. Except that here, life is growing out of the data.
In this space of provocation and encounter, the reader is invited to “play Z’s game” and crash-test different ways of being in language. What will I have been? Who or what owns the ‘collective possessive’? How many life forms can inhabit the same pronoun? Z, the creative principle of life – multitudinous, networked and irreverent – is running the experiment, in an unrepentantly ‘bad science’ mode.
Salvaged from what can’t be thrown away, these poems meet uncertainty with creativity, searching for the freedom and the words to reclaim human and earthly connections.
Olivia McCannon’s Exactly My Own Length won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her translations from French include Balzac and fearless poetry by women.
Browse all Pavilion Poetry collections on the Liverpool University Press website >
Follow us for more updates
Sign up to our mailing list
Twitter | Instagram
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Liverpool University Press Blog 