Seasonal disturbances

Second Place winner of the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry.

A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds (`technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak' - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances.

Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self.

A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach.

Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &.

As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system.

Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an `activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love'.