Carole Satyamurti's poetry explores love, attachment and the fragility of personal survival, charting the tension between connected and separate lives. With an unflinching eye, she takes on complex and often painful subject-matter - cancer for instance or raising a disabled child. Many of her poems hinge on a turning-point or a place where one life touches another, bearing witness to the way we imagine - or fail to imagine - the otherness of others. Stitching the Dark draws on four previous books and includes a whole new collection, her strongest and most formally adventurous. In these new poems, there is a deeper engagement with the universal predicament of how to live in the face of mortality - of what it means to exist, and to cease existing. The title suggests that the act of writing - the search for the right words - is an attempt to repair, illuminate, and give form to what is unknown, fearful, perplexing. But the collection is by no means solemn. There is also wit and celebration, dark humour and a fine sense of the absurd, as well as poems challenging our responses to events that do not affect us directly. She also published a later collection, Countdown (2011).

About the Author
Carole Satyamurti (1939-2019) was a poet, translator and sociologist. For many years she taught at the Tavistock Clinic, where her main academic interest was in the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas to an understanding of the stories people tell about themselves, whether in formal autobiography or in social encounters. She co-edited Acquainted with the Night: psychoanalysis and the poetic imagination (2003). She won the National Poetry Competition in 1986, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2000. Her translation, Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (W.W. Norton, 2015), was joint winner of the inaugural Roehampton Poetry Prize. Her Bloodaxe retrospective, Stitching the Dark: New & Selected Poems (2005), drew on five collections: Broken Moon (1987), Changing the Subject (1990), Striking Distance (1994), Love and Variations (2000), and Stitching the Dark (2005), two of these Poetry Book Society Recommendations. This was followed by Countdown (2011), with a final collection, The Hopeful Hat, to be published posthuously in 2023.

Reviews
No matter how compelling her themes, with their demands of compassion and political conscience, Satyamurti never loses hold of her main topic: the capacity of language. -- Bernard O'Donoghue * Poetry London *
Carole Satyamurti's poems look to be stations on a road map of psychological discoveries, sometimes personal, sometimes objective and scientific. Her best poems are not so much confessions as meditations. -- Anne Stevenson * London Magazine *
Her unobtrusive approach is deceptive - these poems have unexpected stings in their tails. -- Penelope Shuttle



Book Information
ISBN 9781852246921
Author Carole Satyamurti
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd