Books

In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting. Those years living in the town form the focus of her third poetry collection Return by Minor Road.

Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, Williamson revisits where ‘the occasional endures’ and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place:

‘These small movements
towards the bracken
are to be reckoned with.’

Winner
EAW Book by the Cover Award
2016 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry

In her second collection, printer’s daughter Heidi Williamson mines the rich language and history of printing to consider themes of belonging, parenthood, love, and how we communicate, and fail to communicate, with each other.

Individual, familial and cultural inheritance is explored – through subjects ranging from Gutenberg to Gill, Kindles, Twitter, ultrasounds, the death of Diana, 3D printing, climate change, childlessness, genes, and what is downloadable.

By turns sensual, playful, and stark, The Print Museum collects exhibits and fragments from this fading industrial art and displays them alongside pieces driven by the same forces of longing, loss, transformation and delight.

Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2012

Heidi Williamson’s first collection is peopled with vibrant and disturbing shadows. The Northern Lights reach down beneath the London skyline, James Dean learns the craft of distance, Darwin staggers across a heaving ship, Coleridge slumbers on to another dream, and The Travelling Salesman turns a calculator on us.

Fuelled by a residency at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre, Williamson’s fascination with science leads her to explore less usual territories for poetry, including mathematics, chemistry, and computer programming, as well as space travel, electricity, and evolution.

As she investigates the limits of personal and factual knowledge with ‘eyes wide open’, the driving force throughout is a desire to understand the ‘astonishing state of possibilities’ in the world around and inside us.

Edited by Raving Beauties 

Our relationship to our bodies is affected by many things including culture, religion, family, sex, hunger, pleasure and pain. By revealing the complex depths of our relationships with our bodies Hallelujah for 50ft Women makes a much needed contribution to a compassionate understanding of our evolving selves.

Selected from over a thousand submissions, this new anthology from ground-breaking Raving Beauties theatre company includes new poets as well as established writers such as Selima Hill, Kim Addonizio, Jackie Kay and Helen Dunmore.

Edited by Guruprasad Madhavan, a program officer at the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council in Washington, DC

Chefs, poets, music directors, evangelical pastors, skyscraper architects, artists, filmmakers, as well as scientific leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, business executives, policy makers, and the contrarians, shed light on our understanding of sustainability and the role that each of us can play. 

Edited by Andrew Motion

Described by the Daily Mail as ‘a wonderful feast of contemporary poetry’, this year’s edition of the highly praised anthology includes poems by some of the most respected poets of their generation.