Description
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. A The Irish Times Book of the Year. More Sky is a remarkable and remarkably various debut collection from Eric Gregory Award winner, Joe Carrick-Varty, tracking the ways in which experience of addiction and domestic violence shape a life. Carrick-Varty approaches difficult material with great skill and poise: here we find stunning individual lyrics, with an eye for the vivid and surreal; surprising sequences which use Buddhism and Greek myth and the life of coral to refract the poems' interests; and the astonishing sixty-three page long poem 'sky doc' which meditates on suicide, and its retrospective haunting of every corner of its speaker's life.
About the Author
Joe Carrick-Varty is a writer who lives in London. He is the author of two pamphlets, Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019) which won the 2018 New Poets Prize, and 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in the New Statesman, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He is co-founder of bath magg, and a book reviewer for PN Review. In 2019 he was selected by Poetry Ireland as one of Ireland's emerging poets - for the Introductions Series.
Reviews
'The poems in More Sky perform as one sustained hymn, socialising the reader around an environment where material class, artefact, image and mood all work to resist each other. Though such a fraught and contradictory space, the psychology of Carrick-Vartyas verse asks us to consider the ways addiction, fatherhood and the longings of a son coalesce to form a deep and ineffable yearning. These are tender, interior poems that contain all the hallmarks of realism while being masterfully set against an image-range both expansive and unhinged. Carrick-Varty has created something wholly individual and inspired with this collection.' - Anthony Anaxagorou; 'Whatever I expected as I sat to read it for the first time, I failed to anticipate More Sky. How could I have known how complete it would be, how achieved? These poems are loaded with frightening beauties, lines and ideas that inhabit one - rather than merely stopping by for a brief visit - from the moment they're encountered, and together these poems accomplish an even rarer thing: They make a particular, personal story felt by the reader as if lived by the reader, which is better and more difficult than diluting a story by making it universal. More Sky is a debut as strong as any debut I've read in years.' - Shane McCrae; 'These poems make up a memory system. Each by each, they recover a father-son journey through drink and time. Now brutally, like broken glass under foot. Now gently, like being carried over the jagged edges. Cutting and healing. Joe Carrick-Varty writes with a sharp eye and a strong hand.' - Jeanette Winterson
Awards
Short-listed for The T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.
Book Information
ISBN 9781800173019
Author Joe Carrick-Varty
Format Paperback
Page Count 132
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
About the Author
Joe Carrick-Varty is a writer who lives in London. He is the author of two pamphlets, Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019) which won the 2018 New Poets Prize, and 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in the New Statesman, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He is co-founder of bath magg, and a book reviewer for PN Review. In 2019 he was selected by Poetry Ireland as one of Ireland's emerging poets - for the Introductions Series.
Reviews
'The poems in More Sky perform as one sustained hymn, socialising the reader around an environment where material class, artefact, image and mood all work to resist each other. Though such a fraught and contradictory space, the psychology of Carrick-Vartyas verse asks us to consider the ways addiction, fatherhood and the longings of a son coalesce to form a deep and ineffable yearning. These are tender, interior poems that contain all the hallmarks of realism while being masterfully set against an image-range both expansive and unhinged. Carrick-Varty has created something wholly individual and inspired with this collection.' - Anthony Anaxagorou; 'Whatever I expected as I sat to read it for the first time, I failed to anticipate More Sky. How could I have known how complete it would be, how achieved? These poems are loaded with frightening beauties, lines and ideas that inhabit one - rather than merely stopping by for a brief visit - from the moment they're encountered, and together these poems accomplish an even rarer thing: They make a particular, personal story felt by the reader as if lived by the reader, which is better and more difficult than diluting a story by making it universal. More Sky is a debut as strong as any debut I've read in years.' - Shane McCrae; 'These poems make up a memory system. Each by each, they recover a father-son journey through drink and time. Now brutally, like broken glass under foot. Now gently, like being carried over the jagged edges. Cutting and healing. Joe Carrick-Varty writes with a sharp eye and a strong hand.' - Jeanette Winterson
Awards
Short-listed for The T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.
Book Information
ISBN 9781800173019
Author Joe Carrick-Varty
Format Paperback
Page Count 132
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
