The Fisher King

In Rebecca Tamás’s remarkable second poetry collection, a grieving, unnamed narrator walks a broken hero’s journey through green woods and coastlines, accompanied by the elusive figure of the Fisher King, who nurses his own wound. The land they cross has been made sick by a capitalist economy and a growth-obsessed citizenry – an organic world at once degrading and replenishing.

Drawing on the medieval story cycles of the Matter of Britain and giving them a contemporary, intertextual spin, The Fisher King gathers a litany of thinkers – from John Berger to St Silouan the Athonite to Anne Carson – who act as guides and interlocutors.

Taking its cues from folkloric storytelling to conjure an enmeshed sense of being with and in the world, this mesmeric reimagining of the Arthurian tale makes the Fisher King’s immortal wound a metaphor for the gaping chasm between our human selves and the non-human world. How, the book asks, can we ‘be apart, but closely’?