Afterburn

'Blake Morrison’s poems move with unforced grace between grief and illumination, discovering time and again the luminous in the everyday: the light that spills from a canoeist’s oars, the "feather-veins and spider-threads" of a wild fennel leaf… Following the gentle cadence of these poems we are led "bare-foot, soft-foot, lightsome as air" through a terrain of sharp-eyed domestic vignettes, a powerful sonnet sequence addressed to the poet’s late sister and deft refractions of Elizabeth Bishop’s prose. Plain-speaking, intensely humane, and musical, Afterburn distils the insights of a seasoned memoirist into images that linger long after the final page'

Julia Copus

'It isn’t often you pick up a new book of poems without a shadow of literary anxiety hanging over your head. Morrison finds the subtlest feelings in the simplest of material, never the other way round. A master of the sonnet, he is never afraid of starting a poem, then pausing to let the subject matter tell him the rest of it. Every poem seems to be a spontaneous adventure into the unknown-till-now – ours, not his. One about different coloured marital teacups hanging on hooks actually made me cry. I’m taking Afterburn to my desert island'

Hugo Williams

'In Afterburn Blake Morrison takes the quotidian details of our human existence and alchemizes them into poems that are beautifully accessible, lucid, tender and humane. From devastatingly poignant elegies for his sister to poems of furious dissent and protest, Blake Morrison proves himself one of the most formally agile and compassionate poets of our age’

Fiona Benson