Tag: space
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Gizzi the space man: Peter Gizzi’s ‘Fierce Elegy’
In Fierce Elegy (2023), Peter Gizzi’s 2025 T.S. Eliot prize-winning collection of poetry, the poet does many astounding things. These include his use of form, the contiguous suturing of images, and—as I will briefly show—his elaboration of space. Spatial forebear While I was reading Fierce Elegy I was reminded of the early modern English poet,…
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Learning to read Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’
Samantha Harvey‘s delicate 136-page novel Orbital won 2024’s Booker Prize. It marks a notable shift of the difficulty of the last few Booker winners—Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023), Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022), Galgut’s The Promise (2021), and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020)—to an easier style, even if not a typical plot of a novel.…
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Two spatial poetics: Niamh Campbell’s ‘This Happy’
Niamh Campell’s This Happy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020) plots Alannah’s uncanny experience of her love life repeating itself from when she was a ‘young’ 23 to an ‘old(er)’ 30 years old. The two experiences—first with a married man, Harry, second with her unnamed husband—are not identical, but there are enough similarities for the storylines to…