A Year in the New Life

by Jack Underwood

Overview

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
'Jack Underwood has developed an utterly clear lyric that rebukes moral obviousness, drives against false certainty. It's as refreshing as it is instructive . . . Underwood has become one of my favorite poets.' Kaveh Akbar
Jack Underwood's poetry debut, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: 'conversational, arresting . . . weird, singular' (Guardian). Such qualities are on accomplished display in this anticipated new collection, as the poems mature and move on to a wide range of preoccupations, including imminent societal collapse and public unrest; the limits, myths and complexities of masculinity and fatherhood; and uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of fifteen babies or group kissing in Empathy Class.
Throughout, incongruous and domestic subjects realign in skewed lyrics and thought experiments, intimately expressed in 'a new language / of the familiar' ('The Landing'). All is presented with a generosity and tenderness that makes the poet so unmistakable - and indispensable for the strange times in which we live.
'I was done in by these poems, but I really lived as I read them; each one holding life and time in a balletics of stress and flow.' Holly Pester

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571367269
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	08/03/2021
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	164 KB

About the Author

Jack Underwood's debut collection of poems, Happiness (Faber, 2015), won the Somerset Maugham Award. He is a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His non-fiction book Not Even This, about parenthood, uncertainty, and poetic language and knowledge, will be published by Corsair in 2021.
Jack Underwood is an award-winning poet, writer and critic. First published as part of the Faber New Poets seriesin 2009, he is author of two collections of poetry, Happiness (Faber, 2015) and A Year in the New Life (Faber, 2021) and his debut book of non-fiction, Not Even This was published in 2021 by Corsair. He is senior lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths College.

Table of Contents

Errata 3

Poem Beginning with Lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 4

A girl or woman in relation to either or both of her parents 5

An Envelope 6

A Year in the New Life 7

Poem Beginning with a Line by Anna Seward 9

The Landing 10

War the War 12

Please and Thank You 14

I am become a man 15

Fifteen Babies in My Garden 16

This Has No Sound 17

My name is zonal coordinator 18

Prolactin 19

The Long Twenty-first Century 20

My body is a good body 21

Poem Beginning with Lines by Ye Hongxiang 22

Whatever I have done that was good, I have done at the bidding of my voices 23

What Happened Here? 24

Blood Clot in a Winter Landscape 26

Where to start, how to stop? 27

The Situation 28

August Bank Holiday 29

White Cliffs 30

The Novel 31

Lambs 32

Instead of Bad News about a Person I Love 33

I'm on the boating lake with Sean 34

Empathy Class 35

Poem Beginning with Lines by Walter Savage Landor 36

But I know what I like 37

This time 38

Big Shout Out 39

Lying on the floor of the supermarket 40

A Greyhound Levitates across the Street 41

Poem Beginning with a Line by Yu Xuanji 42

Behind the Face of Great White Shark 43

There Is a Supermassive Black Hole Four Million Times the Mass of the Sun at the Centre of Our Galaxy and You Are Pregnant with Our Daughter 44

Alpha Step 46

Breckland 47

Editorial Reviews

"Jack Underwood's poems are exceptional in how they surrender to their own music, each one a kind of expertly controlled free-fall. In this tough and tender time, we need these poems of tenderness, of toughness, and of time." — Natalie Shapero

"The glorious abundance of Jack’s wayward absurdism and imagism creates intellectual plot-points felt like dreams, a way to think about logic in a different way, a way to think about things and people and life in a different way, which is the intention of poetry." — Rachael Allen

"Jack Underwood demonstrates in A Year in the New Life that he’s one of the most innovative imagists and thinkers writing in the English language." — Anthony Anaxagorou

From the Publisher