Another Country : New and Selected Poems

Jane Griffiths writes mysteriously resonant poems about home, exile and shifting frontiers in classically precise language. "Another Country" presents a selection from her first two collections, "A Grip on Thin Air" and "Icarus on Earth", as well as a whole collection of new work. Where the earlier books are shot through with a migrant's sense of estrangement, her new poems explore what it might mean to settle in a place. The central sequence 'Eclogue Over Merlin Street' highlights this changing perspective through a dialogue between two voices of an immigrant in London, one embracing her new life but the other still haunted by displacement. Many other poems echo this tension, caught between love of a place and the fear of losing it. Jane Griffiths celebrates the landscapes she lives in by observing and recording them, yet with a strong awareness that these places exist in and of themselves, regardless of her observation. Hers are poems that delight in being in the world, despite the threat of loss.