A Sense of Place
Poems by Veronica Beedham
Description
A Sense of Place (winner of the Overton Prize 2016) is a wide-ranging collection in which Veronica Beedham takes the reader from the chimney stacks of an old home to The Great Lakes, passing by landscapes from Yorkshire, a motorway service station and an evening in New England. In each case, the detail and personal involvement make the poems beautiful.

‘Lampshades & Glass Rivers’ (winner of the Overton Poetry Prize 2015) follows a young woman’s love, marriage and attempts to conceive. Ada’s experiences are set against the background of her grandmother’s fleeing from Poland during the war. That suffering is always present, although unvoiced, along with her grandmother’s strength and endurance.

Uproot, by Pnina Shinebourne, was the winner of the 2017 Overton Poetry Prize. Over a series of 11 poems, it tells the story of the Ethiopian Jewish diaspora in Jerusalem. Including landscapes, myth, family and personal experience, it is a unique and brilliantly told story. Competition judge Helen Calcutt wrote that “I felt like I was being introduced to a new world: Pnina is a great story-teller…”.

This debut collection by Natalie Moores marks the emergence of a strong new voice in British poetry, and a powerful contribution to the #metoo moment.

“A coherent and accessible sequence. The poetry comes from a very personal place, but it is well-controlled and shaped into something linguistically and imagistically interesting. There’s a story throughout the whole sequence, from the great opening line to the image ‘sprawling through the dirt’ at the end.”

Carol Rowntree-Jones

“The irony of the title is of course that this sequence is the work of a poet who is refusing to hide. Moores uses her singular skill with language and poetic structure to deal with a subject that is painful. Reading 'the tears, the wrath and the aftermath' is also painful at times, but it should be. The sequence is a brilliant response to personal experience: sadly, it is also poetry that speaks to a shared experience.