This National Poetry Day, we’re thrilled to introduce our 2027 Pavilion Poetry collections: Question to the Creatures by Martha Sprackland, Tsvetaeva ’27 by Sasha Dugdale, and Before & After the Night by Jemma Borg.
The collections will publish in spring 2027 and can be preordered now from our website. Learn more about each of these brilliant new collections in our below announcement.
Question to the Creatures interrogates confinement and faith, darkness and light, speech, memory and translation. It takes bearings from the work of the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, whose dark night of the soul surrounds the poet-translator in the small hours of new motherhood. When light does break into the darkness, it’s ambiguous: the intoxicating, trickster LEDs that muddle the navigation systems of moths; the ‘standby lights’ of a taxidermist’s eyes; the orange glow of wildfires encroaching on the places of memory. Things are unearthed, turned to the flickering light, and reckoned with: the teeming world of microbial life (‘a million citizen animalcules on hustling commute / illegible to the eye’s bare bulb’), creaturely consciousness, and our responsibility towards those we love, those we lose, and those we never come to meet. Above all, these poems attend to unknowing – Keats’s negative capability, or the ‘hiddenness’ of the mystics – that prefers questions over answers.
Full of curiosity, attention and doubt, illuminated by moonlight, torchlight, candle-glow and blazing fire, Question to the Creatures is a formidable second collection.
Martha Sprackland’s debut collection Citadel (Pavilion, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Her translation of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross, Dark Night, is published by Penguin Classics.
Question to the Creatures is available to preorder from our website now >
After Rilke’s sudden death at the end of 1926, Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote two works addressed to Rilke that sit among the great European modernist poems. These astounding works rose directly out of the relationship she had had with Rilke and they develop many of the ideas and images of their close correspondence. In ‘New Year Letter’ Tsvetaeva addresses Rilke in the afterlife; and ‘Poem of the Air’ draws a new poetic cosmology from his death.
Tsvetaeva ’27 presents new translations of both works, alongside a new translation of the ‘Elegy’ Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva. The poems are accompanied by a creative essay which sets out the circumstances of the poems’ generation, and offers some insight into the translation process.
Tsvetaeva’s tragic biography often dominates any discussion of her work. This book is an attempt to redress this imbalance: it presents a poet absolutely in control of her medium and her poetic destiny; a poet who ranks among the finest European writers and thinkers of any age.
Sasha Dugdale’s sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox (Carcanet, 2024). Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Tsvetaeva ’27 is available to preorder from our website now >
Before & After the Night, Jemma Borg’s third collection, asks with precision, candour and emotional clarity, what kind of life can be lived when facing personal and global loss – what can we grow ‘from the soil of our breaking’? Borg considers the methods for answering these questions through language, as the poems in the book move among scenes of birth and childhood to the transition of her partner into terminal illness and end-of-life experiences. Grief is seen as a complex experience – where ‘the barest stories grow to incandescence’ — devastating but also necessary and strangely magical. With wit, intellectual energy and unflinching honesty, this book does not advocate false positivity but is a call to remain alive in a beautiful world under threat.
Jemma Borg’s second collection, Wilder (Pavilion, 2022), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a Laurel Prize winner for ecopoetry. Borg was also the winner of the inaugural Ginkgo Poetry Competition, has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition, was highly commended in the Forward Prizes, and received an Arts Council grant. Recent publications include the Times Literary Supplement, The Poetry Review and Poetry London.
Before & After the Night is available to preorder from our website now >
Browse all Pavilion Poetry collections on the Liverpool University Press website >
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