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The central theme of Carole Satyamurti's new collection is the shifting relationship between loss and gain. It explores the varied ways in which that relationship is played out in quotidian experience. The poems range from the personal to the political, and from the psychological to the scientific, many addressing the human cost of war and terror. A sense of the transience and fragility of life runs through all the poems - whether it is life cut short prematurely, or the natural process of aging.
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. Countdown (2011) was her first new collection after Stitching the Dark: New & Selected Poems (2005), which 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. Her translation, Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (W.W. Norton, 2015), was joint winner of the inaugural Roehampton Poetry Prize.
Summary
New collection by leading British poet focussing on the shifting relationship between loss and gain, including many poems addressing the human cost of war and terror, most notably in 'Memorial', written after a visit to Oradour-sur-Glane, the still desolate French village where six hundred innocent people were massacred in 1944.
