THE SKYLARK'S CALL by Paul Jeffcutt
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Paul Jeffcutt lives in Co. Down, Northern Ireland. He is an Emeritus Professor of Queen’s University, Belfast, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has won thirty-three awards for poetry in national and international competitions in Ireland, the UK and the USA; his poems have been published in literary journals in Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, the UK and the USA. He has featured four times on BBC Radio and has regularly appeared at arts festivals in Ireland and the UK.
The Skylark’s Call is Paul’s second poetry collection. The theme of the book is the vitality and impermanence of everyday life. The poems reflect on the memories and meanings that surround this complex borderland. In 2011, Paul began a weekly blog, ‘Writing to Survive’, about his cancer treatment and living with the threat of recurrence. The blog has hundreds of regular readers and has received many plaudits. www.pauljeffcutt.net |
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‘In The Skylark’s Call, Paul Jeffcutt proves himself to be a poet at ease with subjects that so many make a mess of. All the human condition, in its glorious difficulty, is here: the spiritual, the erotic, cancer, politics and history. But the making of these poems is his unshowy expertise with language. It is only a matter of time before he acquires the readership that poetry such as this ultimately insists on.’
— Kevin Higgins ‘The Skylark’s Call takes us on an exhilarating and affecting journey through both the physical world and the human psyche. We see these landscapes through a huge range of characters, from Robert Louis Stevenson to a man in a gorilla suit, revealing not just a host of stories, but also the poet’s sharp eye for observation. We are left with a marvellous sense of what it is to be alive, of the urgency of life.’
— Moyra Donaldson ‘Paul Jeffcutt’s debut collection was alert to mythology, the past and mortality, with a sense of justice very much of the present. The poems in his long-awaited second collection are abrim with those same concerns, but with a new economy, a brusque close attention to the bits of language itself, and with a purposeful outrage. His is a vividly-expressed lyric gift that builds to a memorable collection.’
— Damian Smyth ‘These poems represent a serious reckoning with the horrors and beauties of life, death and our shared common world. Stark, simple ― but never less than complex.’
— Ian Sansom |
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2020
ISBN 978-1-913329-21-1 Paperback, 230 x 158mm, 76 pages RRP £10.00 To order a copy of The Skylark's Call please go to Paul Jeffcutt's website: http://www.pauljeffcutt.net/buy%20books.html
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