Overview

Poetry Book Society Recommendation Summer 2024 Migrating across voices and blurring the divide between bird and human, self and other, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing explores restlessness, love, and ecological and personal grief in a vivid and incantatory sequence of poems. A lyrical biography of a bird and a fragmented study of a flawed and mutable creature bearing its name, Copley’s second collection takes inspiration from John Gower’s brid falseste of alle and its many literary guises. At the heart of the book are the shifting figures of Lapwing and Peet, two creatures whose overlapping narratives echo the double note of the bird’s cry. In Lapwing, known by countless names, migratory, and slowly disappearing beneath addiction, Copley examines a life in a slow tumble, as we are transported into a world shaped by real and imagined predators. Running alongside Lapwing is the searching voice of Peet, a daughter left to understand her father’s vanishing while trying to make a life in a habitat no longer fit for survival. Bold, exacting, and deeply personal, Copley’s poems call out from empty nests, drained wetlands, and ploughed fields to create a soundscape of endangerment and wonder. *Lapwing *asks that we consider how, like the bird itself, we must all dissemble to survive.

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9781802074758

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‘Lapwing is the name of the father in these poems, a father who is becoming lost to addiction, one who evades, flies away. A story of a daughter too, caught watching his tumbling flight that is both labored and light. Copley mixes the anthropomorphic with the incantatory to write a book so beautiful that it aches to read it.’ Juliana Spahr 'Lapwing is quite brilliant - a corkscrewing and glittering helix of art, a story in which love and abandonment are so intertwined as to become one aching song; dry and sidelong, adoring and coruscating, furious with this earth, this life, and deeply adoring, too. I have not read anything quite like it, though fans of Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and Sylvia Plath's Ariel will be seized by Hannah Copley's extraordinary collection. This is a poetry for our time, desperate and beautiful, a storm-surge, perfectly controlled.' Horatio Clare

Author Information

Hannah Copley is a writer, editor and academic based in South-east England. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, and other publications and anthologies. Hannah’s first collection, Speculum, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine.

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