Publisher's Synopsis
"Liz Almond's eagerly anticipated first full-length collection repays the wait. The ground of her work is the family, but the family as we might recognise it from Greek tragedy, writ large, its pains and relationships as vivid and terrifying as war. There is nothing domestic about this book."
Jo Shapcott
"This is an interesting book and the ride suits it. The poems are receptacles for secrets - and metaphors of containment recur: the shut drawer, the cupboard, the bottle, the chest, the black box. The several containers are not unlike Pandora's:
the truths that seep out are grievous and troubling, even though hope (and sometimes joy) is in there too.... The Shut Drawer is well worth opening."
Helena Nelson, Ambit
Liz Almond has been writing poetry for many years, but this, her first, collection has been eight years in the making. Partly autobiographical and partly populated by imagined personae and voices other than the poet's, this book is a rich mix of situations and landscapes in which tensions are always present, where dark presences lurk in the shadows, and where the scorpion's tail is posed ready for the strike. She takes great delight in playing with language, and with a touch that is always delicate, seeks synthesis - however uneasy - between the opposites and ambivalences which run through these powerful poems.
