jane draycott
                   Jemimah Kuhfeld / jemimahkuhfeld.co.uk

     Listen to extracts from The Night Tree         and Over (Carcanet/OxfordPoets) :         



 

 


Biography

Jane Draycott is a UK-based poet with a particular interest in sound art and collaborative work.   Her latest collection Over  (Carcanet/OxfordPoets)  was shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize.   Nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, her first two full collections Prince Rupert's Drop and The Night Tree (Carcanet/OxfordPoets) were both Poetry Society Recommendations.  Other collections include, from Two Rivers Press, Christina the Astonishing (with Peter Hay and Lesley Saunders) and Tideway, a long sequence of poems about London's working river (with paintings by Peter Hay) written while poet-in-residence at the River & Rowing Museum as well as a short collection No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop).

Her audio work with Elizabeth James has won several awards including BBC Radio 3 Poem-for-Radio and a London Sound Art Award. Winner of the Keats Shelley Poetry Prize in 2002 and nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's  Next Generation poets in 2004,  she teaches on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.   Her new translation of the 14th century dream-vision Pearl (2011), is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was a Stephen Spender Prize-winner in 2008.   She is currently Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Aston University.

I've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact 'The Night Tree' is the finest collection I've read for ages.     David Morley - The Guardian

Those who enjoyed Jane Draycott's 'Tideway' poems...will know how well she evokes the otherness of the underwater river-world... and it is in this sense that the word 'quiet' should be applied to the chords and modulations of Draycott's eerie and beautiful poems. She listens, and therefore so do we.         Sean O'Brien,  The Guardian

The language [of 'Pearl'] is marvellously modulated yet stirringly wild. Draycott has carried over into our tamer, tired world a strong, strange sense of how original, gorgeous and natural this old poem can be.      Poetry Review

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