The Iron Bridge
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:28th Mar '24
Should be back in stock very soon
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025
Highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2024
Rebecca Hurst's first collection bridges memory and observation, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it. The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images – from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.
'Rebecca Hurst writes as a naturalist, a daughter rolled up into dirt like a woodlouse, a mother, the forest, a snowy singer. She's my favourite unreliable narrator. Words are good but touch is better. Take The Iron Bridge. She'll let you walk ahead. Be pinched by the links. Take a scalding sip. Be magicked back to life.'
Carol Mavor
'One of the great pleasures of these poems is the way in which Parson's Wood is intimately known through such precisely placed language.'
Judith Willson
- Commended for Forward Prizes 2024
- Short-listed for Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025
ISBN: 9781800173941
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
128 pages