Lapwing

‘Lapwing is the name of the father in these poems, a father who is becoming lost to addiction, one who evades, flies away. A story of a daughter too, caught watching his tumbling flight that is both labored and light. Copley mixes the anthropomorphic with the incantatory to write a book so beautiful that it aches to read it.’ Juliana Spahr

‘Lapwing is quite brilliant - a corkscrewing and glittering helix of art, a story in which love and abandonment are so intertwined as to become one aching song; dry and sidelong, adoring and coruscating, furious with this earth, this life, and deeply adoring, too. I have not read anything quite like it, though fans of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel will be seized by Hannah Copley’s extraordinary collection. This is a poetry for our time, desperate and beautiful, a storm-surge, perfectly controlled.’ Horatio Clare

‘Reading Lapwing felt like being at the races, with Hannah Copley riding her language like a jockey, and following the movements and journeyings of Peet, the shapeshifting lapwing, was sheer joy. Yes, what I like about these dispatches from the ornithologist following and observing the lapwing as it moves around the world is the riffing of the voice, how it tries to capture a character that refuses to be captured. As the voice gets caught up in Peet’s ecstatic movement, the language becomes (word)play, immersive and compulsive. I felt something grow as I read. This lapwing got me thinking about what it means to be a shapeshifting, dissembling character in the world as it is.’ Jason Allen-Paisant