Description
The Wound Register, or Casualty Book - which gives this book its title - is an official record of the casualty and sickness details for more than fifteen thousand soldiers of the Norfolk Regiment during the First World War. Written during the conflict's centenary, the poems in Esther Morgan's fourth collection apply the concept to her own family history in the aftermath of her great grandfather's death at the Somme. An unflinching sequence written to her grandmother explores the trauma of losing a father in combat, while other poems address the missing soldier directly as he hovers on the brink of living memory. Morgan's experience of coming late to motherhood brings the book into the present, giving her alertness to loss a fresh urgency as she traces the legacy of three generations. Written with the lyrical precision of her earlier work but with a new intimacy, The Wound Register grapples movingly with the question of whether it's possible to live and love while doing no harm.
About the Author
Esther Morgan was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire. She first started writing poetry while working as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 1997, she taught on UEA's undergraduate creative writing course and for the Department of Continuing Education. During her time at UEA Morgan edited four editions of the poetry anthology Reactions. As well as freelance teaching and editing she helped set up The Poetry Archive, the world's largest online collection of poets reading their own work, working as the site's Historic Recordings Manager for several years: www.poetryarchive.org. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1998, and her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance, was published by Bloodaxe in 2001. It won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second collection, The Silence Living in Houses (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), was largely inspired by her time caretaking a run-down Edwardian house in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. In 2010 she won the Bridport Poetry Prize for her poem 'This Morning', included in her third collection Grace (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her fourth collection, The Wound Register, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018 and was shortlisted for poetry category of the East Anglian Book Awards 2018. It was runner-up for the 2019 New Angle Prize for Literature. After four years in Oxfordshire she moved back to Norfolk where she lives with her husband and daughter and currently works for Norfolk Museums Service.
Reviews
'Grace, Esther Morgan's third collection, is an extraordinary, radiant book. Its poetry makes quietly insistent demands uppon the reader: "In the stillness, everything becomes itself."... The afterglow of Esther Morgan's luminous work is not certainty, but questions. Can imagination transform, or simply recognise, what is there? Do these poems come by grace of Muse or angel?' - Alison Brackenbury, Poetry London; 'We speak of "the poet's voice", a phrase which comes to mind when considering what's special about Grace: the consistency and perfect pitch of the 'voice'. Open any page, pick any poem, and the reader hears poetry that sings without use of a single poetic device of sound or form. That's not easy to get right. It's a book of rooms, interiors, sensed presences and absences, noted detail, the graceful and the slovenly - white plates on a kitchen table, a slipware bowl, the year-old jar of nails and flies. It's a quiet book, full of grace, like a painting by Vermeer, and, like the work of Vermeer, each work of art inhabits the same house. This collection doesn't strike a single false note.' - Gillian Clarke, T.S. Eliot Prize judge's comment on Grace; 'The visionary gleam is picked up and amplified by poem after poem in Esther Morgan's superb new collection... Morgan's passion for light is also a yearning for space and air, for an uncluttered and ethereal existence.' - Jem Poster, Poetry Review
Book Information
ISBN 9781780374109
Author Esther Morgan
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
About the Author
Esther Morgan was born in Kidderminster, Worcestershire. She first started writing poetry while working as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 1997, she taught on UEA's undergraduate creative writing course and for the Department of Continuing Education. During her time at UEA Morgan edited four editions of the poetry anthology Reactions. As well as freelance teaching and editing she helped set up The Poetry Archive, the world's largest online collection of poets reading their own work, working as the site's Historic Recordings Manager for several years: www.poetryarchive.org. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1998, and her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance, was published by Bloodaxe in 2001. It won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second collection, The Silence Living in Houses (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), was largely inspired by her time caretaking a run-down Edwardian house in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. In 2010 she won the Bridport Poetry Prize for her poem 'This Morning', included in her third collection Grace (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her fourth collection, The Wound Register, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018 and was shortlisted for poetry category of the East Anglian Book Awards 2018. It was runner-up for the 2019 New Angle Prize for Literature. After four years in Oxfordshire she moved back to Norfolk where she lives with her husband and daughter and currently works for Norfolk Museums Service.
Reviews
'Grace, Esther Morgan's third collection, is an extraordinary, radiant book. Its poetry makes quietly insistent demands uppon the reader: "In the stillness, everything becomes itself."... The afterglow of Esther Morgan's luminous work is not certainty, but questions. Can imagination transform, or simply recognise, what is there? Do these poems come by grace of Muse or angel?' - Alison Brackenbury, Poetry London; 'We speak of "the poet's voice", a phrase which comes to mind when considering what's special about Grace: the consistency and perfect pitch of the 'voice'. Open any page, pick any poem, and the reader hears poetry that sings without use of a single poetic device of sound or form. That's not easy to get right. It's a book of rooms, interiors, sensed presences and absences, noted detail, the graceful and the slovenly - white plates on a kitchen table, a slipware bowl, the year-old jar of nails and flies. It's a quiet book, full of grace, like a painting by Vermeer, and, like the work of Vermeer, each work of art inhabits the same house. This collection doesn't strike a single false note.' - Gillian Clarke, T.S. Eliot Prize judge's comment on Grace; 'The visionary gleam is picked up and amplified by poem after poem in Esther Morgan's superb new collection... Morgan's passion for light is also a yearning for space and air, for an uncluttered and ethereal existence.' - Jem Poster, Poetry Review
Book Information
ISBN 9781780374109
Author Esther Morgan
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd
