Me and the Dead

In one of the best debut collections for ages, Katy Evans-Bush rises to the challenge of finding words for our times, meeting them in the nurseries of children or the battlefields of Iraq. Her work is various, educated and promiscuously open to experience: a Bishoppy moose makes an unepiscopal escape into TV’s Northern Exposure as its name morphs through Muldoonian games; Catullus is translated into rougharse while the title-poem takes the pulse of modern death. She makes good use of her joint passport into British and American poetry, which now often seem to share a whole language of faux amis, in a book which is stylish and funny, cultured and humane. This is contemporary poetry for grown-ups.

Table of contents

The Only Reader
The Bog of Despair
Life (a Dream)
The Metropolitan Opera
As the Sun Sends the Sequins on my Handbag Scattering
Here
My Dish
To My Next Lover
East Ten
Dinosaur Opera
Whereas the Strings
The Escape Artists
The Electrical Paradox
Two Egotists in a Hotel
Nero the Beautiful
Across the Lake
Imitating Life
The Raft of the Medusa
Cosi Fan Tutte
Dissection of a Split Second
Between Two Heroes
The Giraffe That Wasn’t There (and the Giraffe That Was)
An Operation in New York
Centre Point
Or Something
After
Moose: an Adventure in Real Time
The Wind
Fragment
The Downs
The Cathedral
Abney Park Cemetery
Scared of Knives
The Huge Husband
Off
Bonfire Nights
Your Ghosts
Our Passion
Sugar Bakers Lane
Dream: the Twelve Dancing Princesses
In Which the Poet Adopts the Shape of a Swineherd, to Little Avail
A Later Letter on Art
The Crash (a Love Letter)
Me and the Dead
The Dive
The Cave
Pity
I See the Hudson River, the Hudson River Sees Me
The Life Mask
The Brass Doorknob
A Crack in the Feeling
This is Happening
The Master and the Future