Praising Joe Carrick Varty's debut, the T.S. Eliot Prize judges observed that his work 'confronts fraught spaces of addiction and domestic violence [...its] lyricism shaped by a raw and fragmented reality'.

His outstanding second collection reflects further on growing up under the cloud of abuse and alcoholism, unfolding compelling patterns as it examines how the past shapes our future lives. Bold and unusual in form, its three gripping long poems look unflinchingly and unforgettably at inheritance, pain and memory.

About the Author
Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. He is the author of two pamphlets of poetry: Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019) and 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020). His work has appeared in the New Statesman, The Poetry Review and Poetry London. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. More Sky is his debut collection.

Reviews

'Before Violence charts ideas around fate and lineages, and how we can, or can't, interrupt what might lie in wait for us.
Skies are brought into proximity with glowing bodies of water, the parts of the body closest to our intimacies with other people - hands and faces - are positioned as recipients of care and violence, and capable of complicity in both.
The poems play with scale and time to create a forceful narrative that moves from childhood to adulthood, and thinks towards the various futures that close and open to us through a structure that initially cracks, then reassembles.
This book is an elegy to personal histories, and a long ode to making peace with hopeful pathways.'
Rachael Allen

Book Information
ISBN 9781800175426
Author Joe Carrick-Varty
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint Carcanet Poetry
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd