'The Kingdom' by Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott’s new poetry collection The Kingdom has been published by Carcanet Press. Jane is a Senior Associate Tutor on our Master's in Creative Writing.

 

The Kingdom is a book which Jane describes as having its eye turned towards the future, ‘toward the ever-continuing approach of the unknown’. The collection includes several poems from her ongoing conversation with the medieval imagination, a conversation that began with her Stephen Spender Prize-winning translation of the 14th-century dream-vision Pearl.

 

‘Many of the poems in The Kingdom were written during the months of lockdown restrictions,' said Jane, 'and, while not writing about the Covid pandemic explicitly, I found myself like so many others thinking about the effects of isolation and the desire for connection. There are more poems than I’d realised about hope and its value in times of uncertainty. I think that's also where the several encounters in the collection with medieval voices may spring from – that search for certainty among the mysteries of the then-known world.’ 

 

One of the poems, ‘The Claim’, was selected by Carol Rumens as a recent Guardian Poem of the Week.

 

Two poems, ‘The Kingdom’ and ‘The Experiment’, read by Jane, are available on Carcanet’s YouTube video channel. Carcanet published four of Jane's earlier award-nominated publications, including Prince Rupert’s Drop, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Over, nominated for the T S Eliot Prize.

 

This is Jane’s third publication of 2022, following the re-issue of the sold-out collections St Christina the Astonishing, co-written with Lesley Saunders, and Tideway, both illustrated by artist Peter Hay and now republished as part of the Two Rivers Illustrated Classics series.

 

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