Earth's Almanac

by Lucy Newlyn

The poems in Earth's Almanac emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of the poet's sister. Lucy Newlyn adapts the tradition of the "Shepherd's Calendar" to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year. The poems shift through forms and move between places - Oxford, Borrowdale, and finally Cornwall, where the poet finds a second home near the sea. In these intense expressions of love and loss, anger and guilt, there is no smooth path towards consolation.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2015

Reviews

[James Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Earth’s Almanac is a wonderful book. There is a beautiful compression in the language, as though a wrapped heart beats its way, weaving through lives. How it takes life, earth, and sea, into the personal narrative and makes it a universal family. The interplay with Sally’s story, a sister’s story, and the bugger of life happening all around at the same time as loss and gain expand. There are moments which recur unexpectedly as we go about things – the images, the flicker, the reflection of, and on so much, in the ‘furry veins’, the grammar of loss. This is poetry at its fine point, where Newlyn takes the thread of experience and runs it through our own days, making each one a thing of beauty.