by Jemma Borg (Author)
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022.
Third Prize winner of the Laurel Prize 2022.
What is still wild in us - and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg's second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante's forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to 'break ourselves each against the beauty of the other'. They call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are, in connection with the complex web of life in what Mary Midgley called an 'extended sympathy', and to consider wildness as a process of becoming, reforming and growth. We do not live in a time when we can afford denial. Instead, by being willing to enter despair, might we find what Gary Snyder described as 'the real world to which we belong' and recover the means to save what we are
destroying?
Author Biography
Jemma Borg won the inaugural Ginkgo Prize in 2018 and The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Competition in 2017. Recent publications include the TLS, The Poetry Review and Oxford Poetry, and anthologies such as 'Out of Time' (Valley Press 2021) and 'Places of Poetry' (Oneworld 2020), and her first collection, 'The illuminated world' (Eyewear, 2014), won the Fledgling Award and the New Writing Ventures Award for Poetry. She was a zoologist and evolutionary geneticist before working in scientific research management in the voluntary sector and in science publishing.
Number of Pages: 70
Dimensions: 0.27 x 7.49 x 4.77 IN
Publication Date: May 01, 2022
