Penelope Layland

From the author of the award-winning Things I've thought to tell you since I saw you last comes a new collection of poems steeped in a sense of dark foreboding. Jumping from the global to the everyday, many of the poems in Nigh chime with the mood that all is not right with the world. Even in the seemingly mundane, or the overtly beautiful, lay some uncomfortable truths, waiting to be unpicked. Nigh fully displays the confidence of a poet looking and thinking deeply about the world and offering it up in crisp and beguiling.

This new volume from Penelope Layland absorbingly quizzes memory, while questioning our apprehension of time and the importance of deep human connections. These poems explore mourning and loss in a way that is salutary, affirmative, meditative and uplifting, subtly refracting our common understandings and our claims on knowledge. In these works the ghosted quotidian, like a long filigree of light, reaches out to remind us of what we value and care for.