Grace

Shortlisted for the 2011 TS Eliot Prize Poetry Book Society Recommendation What happens if, when the angel arrives with his message, no one's at home? In poems of lyric concentration, Grace examines our need for purpose, for the signs that might help us decide what to do with our lives. It's a desire that makes for restless spirits -like the woman who keeps shifting her furniture around or the invisible subjects of an early photograph, moving too fast to be captured. Other poems ask what happens when we reconcile ourselves to watching and waiting -whether the angle of the sun in a guest room or the colour of a bruised clementine is really 'enough to be going on with'. Haunted by a blue sky out of which something (or nothing) might come, these are poems of intensely felt moments. They create a vision both troubled and informed by doubt, where the ghost of a film star may be the closest we can come to grace. 'Poems of outstanding beauty and a decidedly celebratory wisdom that takes nothing for granted. This is poetry of the first order by a poet who really knows how to sing' -John Burnside 'Esther Morgan's poems are full of hints and mysteries. They dance on sensuous feet while keeping a troubled eye on the music that keeps them dancing. But there are joys here as well as anxieties, and it is the two that amplify each other into such clear, poignant and resonant shapes' -George Szirtes 'Morgan works like an archaeologist, creating imagined histories of lives by uncovering what was previously hidden' -Robyn Bolam, Magma 'Esther Morgan's poetry is wonderfully elegant, poignant and wise' -Antony Dunn, Poetry London