Deltas
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Leonie Rushforth
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Shortlisted for the 2022 Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection
Deltas, Leonie Rushforth’s first book, reveals a poetics on high alert, where the ‘tireless human sonar’ scans a compromised world for calamity and grace. In her vision of precarity and connectedness, attention might prove the opposite of surveillance: a tender, sober act of keeping faith with the ethical force of exact expression.
Her poems are provisional landscapes, like river deltas, where with language both sidelong and luminous she suggests a way of seeing and measuring distances – temporal, spatial, political – that opens a route not only to individual survival but to humane dialogue and the hope of community.
‘These are urgent, elegant, mesmerising poems. With superb lyric receptiveness, Rushforth bears witness to the “soft body” that exists “on the margin of what is really happening”. Deltas is a book to live with, a sober and passionate response to the presences and absences around which our private and public lives are formed.’– Frances Leviston
‘…these are poems which can, in the imagination, go anywhere… And so, with verve and vibrancy, they do.’
– Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
Published 8 February 2022. An exclusive extract can be read in Hotel, here.
Description
Deltas, Leonie Rushforth’s first book, reveals a poetics on high alert, where the ‘tireless human sonar’ scans a compromised world for calamity and grace. In her vision of precarity and connectedness, attention might prove the opposite of surveillance: a tender, sober act of keeping faith with the ethical force of exact expression.
Her poems are provisional landscapes, like river deltas, where with language both sidelong and luminous she suggests a way of seeing and measuring distances – temporal, spatial, political – that opens a route not only to individual survival but to humane dialogue and the hope of community.
‘Deltas is a delicate and subtle collection, but one that also contains a potent, muscular undertow of intense and sometimes violent emotion. Rushforth’s voice is fresh and startling – making you see the detail of the world anew, illuminated by her brilliantly precise and dazzling language. A rich, deeply rewarding poetic experience.’ – Rebecca Tamás
‘Great poetry notices the unnoticed. In her welcome debut collection Rushforth displays a talent for paying meticulous attention both to language and the world it describes. She has an uncanny ability to find the tiny importances in things through poems suffused with a mixture of tenderness and clarity of vision. Past, present and future coalesce and converse but there is nothing retrospective here – these are memorable and important poems which furnish us with “a way to look back/that will deliver us from the future.” A remarkable, unforgettable collection for these remarkable and unforgettable times.’ – John Glenday
‘Rather as the muntjac is “picking its material way across the paddock, / believing itself to be both spotlit / as indeed it was, and invisible” (‘Muntjac’), this poetry is also concerned with the visible and the invisible. Leonie Rushforth perfectly balances an interiority of vision with a sense of the physicality of the world. The language is surprisingly elastic and steadily revealing of the barely expressible. A distinctive and most welcome début.’ – Moniza Alvi
‘These poems flow through vivid landscapes to reveal the constantly changing journey of relationships, the unions and farewells in a life, through the constantly changing relationships of water – river to land, river to ocean, and “the silvery light” by which we look at them all. Beautiful.’ – Ruth Padel
Leonie Rushforth was born in Ely in 1956. She lives in east London. Deltas is her first full collection of poems.
Read a sample: Leonie Rushforth_Deltas_sample
