When I Kiss the Sky
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These poems explore the dynamics of presence and absence, the shapes they make and the continuities between them. There is lament but also affection and delight, along with a strong curiosity about the nature of change. Cook writes with simplicity and intensity, finding vivid and subtle life in what she notices.
A most welcome new collection from Elizabeth Cook: necessary, sustaining poems that brim with luminous insights and remind us time and again that there is another world and it is in this one – Michael Laskey
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These poems explore the dynamics of presence and absence, the shapes they make and the continuities between them. There is lament but also affection and delight, along with a strong curiosity about the nature of change. Cook writes with simplicity and intensity, finding vivid and subtle life in what she notices.
A most welcome new collection from Elizabeth Cook: necessary, sustaining poems that brim with luminous insights and remind us time and again that there is another world and it is in this one – Michael Laskey
Gust
When she considers how long it has been
since another person’s large, tobacco-soaked
tongue has occupied her mouth she remembers
the time when their dog picked up the ball
of a curled-up hedgehog and could not get it out
of her soft mouth so they had to prise it
free – all those spines – till both creatures
were separate again and the hedgehog
made off with surprising speed while the dog panted,
slack-jawed and salivating, her whole nature burning
from the recent, astonishing conjunction.
As part of the Royal Literary Fund Writers Aloud series, Elizabeth talks to Ann Morgan about the experience of seeing your words set in music, the physical craft of writing and the difference between creating poetry and prose. Listen here.
Published: 25 November 2021
ISBN: 9781905208470
Pages: 84
“[The poems’] energy comes from the keenness of her observation and her understanding of how the counter-play of presence and absence can shape poems. […] Attention to pattern, both within nature and human belief, underpins her collection.
So much of this collection deals with the inevitable process of changing and ways of paying attention to it, whether this is by theologists, historians, writers, architects or simply the individual person. It is a thoughtful and observant collection.” – D.A. Prince London Grip
“A compassionate, life-enhancing writer” – Merryn Williams, Agenda online
“full of tender, memorable writing and some searing elegies in particular” – Anna Woodford, Poetry Society Books of the Year 2021
“Poetry as flight, song, life, beauty, otherness. […] Some of Cook’s poems touch on deep mysteries as lightly as Yeats’s long-legged fly. […] Time and again Cook’s poems sparkle with a word which is risky but exact. […] Cook’s poetry is Heaney-like in being open to the legendary and the marvellous whilst remaining sensuous and grounded. The balance of the collection inclines from earlier poems of innocence to later ones of loss and grief. Throughout, these are ‘springy’ poems of compassion, praise and sustenance.” – Ed Reiss, Stand magazine
Elizabeth Cook was born in Gibraltar in 1952, spent her childhood in Nigeria and Dorset, and these days lives in East London. She is the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats, author of Achilles (Methuen and Picador USA), a work of fiction with a performance life, and of Lux (Scribe), a novel encompassing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba and that of the Tudor poet, Thomas Wyatt. Her poetry, short fiction and critical reviews have appeared in journals including Agenda, The London Review of Books, Poetry London, Stand, Moving Worlds and Tears in the Fence. She wrote the libretto for Francis Grier’s The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, jointly commissioned by VocalEssence in Minneapolis and the BBC, and has since collaborated with Grier on a sequence of poems for a Vespers, premiered in 2014 at King’s College Chapel, and a Nativity oratorio, Before All Worlds. She has been a Hawthornden Fellow and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen Mary University. In addition to the full collections published by Worple she has published a pamphlet, The Sound of the Rain, with the Garlic Press (2017).
