New Light for the Old Dark

Name: New Light for the Old Dark
Price: 29.99 AUD
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ISBN: 9780224089180

Sam Willetts

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English

Jonathan Cape
15 April 2010

Poetry by individual poets

An extraordinary first collection of poems from an assured new writer

The poems in this remarkable first collection have been hard won- 'Fruits of much grief they are,' as Donne said, 'emblems of more.' Having lost ten years to heroin addiction and recovery, Sam Willetts emerges now - suddenly, and apparently from nowhere - as a fully-fledged and significant English poet.

In a book deeply conscious of history, one series of poems tracks his mother's escape, as a young girl, from the Nazis, in a narrative that moves from a Stuka attack on the Smolensk Road to the Krakow ghetto, the destruction of Warsaw, to Nuremberg and Nagasaki and, finally, his mother's grave. Other poems address Englishness, secular Jewishness, and the childhood pleasures of Oxfordshire - an increasingly deceptive pastoral, stalked and eventually shattered by heroin, which brings a grim new existence among dealers and users. The redemption the poet finds, through detox and rehab, love and writing, is full of regret for the years and lives wasted, but also offers a lyrical rebirth of the senses- 'In a new light, a new moon/ that isn't made of scorched tinfoil/will turn your tide again'.

Deft, economical and wonderfully original, this is work that celebrates the peaks and troughs of a lived life, the poems' vivid clarity feeling both fresh and fully earned. It is rare to find an unknown poet of such mature quality, and New Light for the Old Dark represents a brilliant dawning.

By: Sam Willetts
Imprint: Jonathan Cape
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 197mm, Width: 130mm, Spine: 5mm
Weight: 102g
ISBN: 9780224089180
ISBN 10: 0224089188
Pages: 72
Publication Date: 15 April 2010
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sam Willetts was born in 1962 and has spent most of his life in Oxford, where he read English at Wadham College, and in London. He has worked as a teacher, journalist and travel writer.

Reviews for New Light for the Old Dark

Sam Willetts has been through fire and come back, with his own improbable cantor's quorum ready-assembled around him: mystic, junkie, dealer, truant child, Holocaust survivor, son, lover, brother - he is able to make them all sing, in poems of such fluency and force, such holy fortuity of phrasing, they make us want to celebrate even as they make us mourn. A natural like few others -- Henry Shukman This letter is sheer poetry to the bard of no fixed abode * Sunday Times interview *

Short-listed for Costa Poetry Award 2010
Short-listed for Felix Dennis Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection 2010
Short-listed for T S Eliot Prize 2010
Shortlisted for Costa Poetry Award 2010.
Shortlisted for Felix Dennis Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection 2010.
Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize 2010.