Böcker av Frances Presley

The first volume of Frances Presley's Collected Poems, 1973 to 2004, provides an important overview of her earlier life and poetic development. She experiments with modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations, sometimes associated with the new British poetry. Her feminism and political commitment are sharply defined, alongside a growing concern for ecology. It includes The Sex of Art, Hula Hoop, Linocut and Somerset Letters, as well as her collaborations, with artist Irma Irsara, on women's clothing, Automatic Cross Stitch, and with poet Elizabeth James, Neitherthe One nor the Other. It supersedes and expands her selected poems, Paravane (2004) and Myne (2006).'Frances Presley is a splendid and authentic poet whose work shines with exact edge and luminous presence of what she notices and chooses to translate into language' -Kathleen Fraser'Frances Presley's writing engages with serious political concerns underscored with deeply personal experience. e world 'out there' of unrest, injustice, and conflict is not something to be compartmentalised but co-exists with the domestic on equal terms. A summer flower or childhood memory in Somerset blossoms next to the exploding horrors of Semtex. She is not a poet to shy away from life but pushes language into its face until it yelps'. -Geraldine Monk'Presley's poems are minesweepers working below the surface to explode the breezy assumptions of Thatcherist consumer capitalism, or to explore what has already caved in'. -Meredith Quatermain

The second volume of Frances Presley's Collected Poems, 2004 to 2020, brings together a distinctive body of work, representing a major achievement in modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations. Feminism and political commitment are still evident, but ecology and ecopoetics are foregrounded. It includes Stone Settings and Longstones which explores Neolithic stones on Exmoor, in collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading; the playful An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt; as well Halse for Hazel, which received an Arts Council award; and the Ada Lovelace project, Ada Unseen. There is also a new sequence, Channels, on shorelines and parallel coasts. 'Welcome to this comprehensive, collected poems from one of our most impressive contemporary poets. Here we can trace how, from her earliest poems, with their intense and tense engagement with her modernist forbears, Frances Presley has maintained an uncompromising integrity and invention. Her use of the page as a space of experimentation and of language as a multiple-stranded thread of living letters and sounds is dazzling, and these volumes allow us to see the shifts in this practice over decades. Each collection has built on the last, yet remained open to the world as she sees it at the moment of writing, as she greets it with an eye and voice both tender and sardonic. We see this in the wit with which she incorporates diverse found materials into her work and in her engagement with her fellow poets and artists through allusion, conversation and collaboration. In these carefully woven webs, her sense of place and the politics of landscape and her astute feminism remain constant.' -Harriet Tarlo'As these volumes attest, Frances Presley's is the poetry of the artisan, authentic in the sharpest sense of the word: rare, inventive, its original beauties edged and tempered by the traditional skills in which they germinated. Nomadic in theme, sinewy of thought, filigree in habit, this oeuvre rummages with discriminating care among the cultural-linguistic currents and debris complicating the experiencing of place, distant or proximal, prehistoric or contemporary, empty or inhabited.' -Alice Entwhistle'Presley combines deliberate poetry and environmental engagement to compel us to think and act. She sews together language, time, and space; and shows us that the creative act itself inspires a vivid ecopoetics of the imagination.' -Chad Weidner

The Sex of Art was Frances Presley's first collection, from 1985. Although much of it has since reappeared in other guises, the entire book has not been republished and its structure - mixing prose and poetry freely - is unclear if one does not see as it was originally conceived.

A collection of poems from 'Stone settings and longstones', a sequence framed by the Neolithic stone monuments on Exmoor. It reflects the fragile, elusive and disputed existence of these sites, as well as the enduring landscape which surrounds them.

This book contains a long, new sequence of poems and prose by Frances Presley, as well as a selection of her work since 1996. It provides an important opportunity to see her recent work as a whole, and to appreciate how different sequences interrelate and develop, both in form and theme.