Happiness

£10.99

With the sort of smart, persuasive voice associated with Simon Armitage and Michael Donaghy, these poems worry at the world in search of consolation, or else meet life’s absurdity and strangeness half-way; whether sitting proudly atop an unexploded bomb, or injecting blood under the skin of a banana, playfulness and imagination are vehicles for confronting ‘the fearful and forgotten things I’ve lied to myself about’. Here are poems which address anxiety about fatherhood, remorse for lost lovers and friends, or mourn for a miscarried sibling.

In stock

ISBN: 9780571313617 Category: Tags: ,

Description

Happiness is the long-anticipated debut collection from Jack Underwood. These bright, beguiling poems worry at the world, surreally exploring the ‘reservoir of wrongheaded questions’ with which love and death confront us. Readers will meet life’s strangeness half-way in poems where a childhood horse and recent lover look through a photo album together; where ‘sadness is a yacht . . . an anvil dropped from heaven’; fear for a future child is ‘a fizz building in a bad grey egg’; a beef steak is ‘a question, hung in itself, about blood’, and love is someone ‘pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain’. In the unpredictable world of these inventive poems, visualisation becomes an empathetic act, a means of sharing the ‘fearful and forgotten things’ we lie to ourselves about.

Happiness is a collection preoccupied with the ephemerality of happiness itself, at the ever-present possibility of its departure, and the ways we try to grasp and keep hold of it. Self-aware and sad, daring and funny, this is an accomplished and memorable debut from a distinct new voice.