Wild Life

Synopsis

In You have no normal country to return to, Tom Sastry explores questions of national identity and 'the end of history'. A blistering, bleakly funny and timely second poetry collection, following his Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize shortlisted, A Man's House Catches Fire. By turns crisply satirical and questioning, You have no normal country to return to ranges across the legacies of Empire, postwar migration and the current crisis in English identity. Sastry's precise, brilliantly attuned poetry asks how the times we live in and the tales we tell about them affect us; how our emotional landscapes are shaped by national myths and the more personal stories we tell about ourselves. It is a book about illusion, and discovering, again and again, that what was once taken for granted was never really there; a guidebook for an age of "enchantments collapsing on themselves".

Wild Life by James McDermott explores the nature of queerness, the queerness of nature, and the queerness of 'natural' masculinity. In bold poems that root themselves firmly in the coastal landscapes of North Norfolk, a vivid and radical dialogue between nature, sexuality and self-discovery emerges. McDermott brings a lyrical physicality to poetry which focuses on the body, desire, shame, and tenderness, creation and re-creation, and where there is 'everything always opening / everything always coming out'. These poems skilfully graft and touch, draw parallels between moments of transformation in the many kinds of ecosystems we exist in - whether outside and between woodland, shoreline and skyline, where the wildlife will 'see me as just another animal', or in human interactions in schools, gyms, and pubs where ideas of manhood, self, and society's expectations collide. Like the coastal spaces where McDermott finds an innate connection, Wild Life identifies that which is fluid and constantly changing - and that nature itself isn't afraid of being colourful, excessive, too much.

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