Self and history collide, selves fracture, the flag is divided, monuments collapse. In her sixth collection, Sarah Corbett considers the fragments we might hold against dissolution, whether personal, national, or global. Midnight in Leningrad, 1940, Anna Akhmatova waits for a poem to arrive, in her hand an egg; on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a writer recalls her breakdown as a student in 1989. In the pandemic year an isolated artist communes with a tree; visitors to an art gallery are led on a journey of rebirth; missives find their way back to us from a flooded world. The book opens with an invocation to the goddess Ishtar, and closes with the goddess rising from a spring thirty years in the future, 'the world's unspoken desire' to be reborn. A series of ekphrastic 'interventions' respond to 20th century European cinema, the work of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, and consider what art can offer in face of the predicaments we find ourselves in. Summoning the 'Red horse of time, white horse of poetry, blue horse of dreams,' poetry's answer is the search for connection, love; and for presence, where we might meet each other, transcendent.

About the Author
Sarah Corbett has published five collections of poetry, including 'A Perfect Mirror' (Pavilion Poetry, 2018), and the verse-novel 'And She Was' (Pavilion, 2015). She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for Lancaster University and lives in Hebden Bridge.


Book Information
ISBN 9781836244578
Author Sarah Corbett
Format Paperback
Page Count 60
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press