Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection
A Financial Times, Irish Times and Telegraph Book of the Year
history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn''t
It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once.
Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One, the poems range across old Europe: ''Edelweiss'' and Titanic setting sail, to a transatlantic, cross-century symposium in Part Two, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through, it''s practically always the
