Midas' Daughter is Vuyelwa Carlin's first full-length book of poems. She has a growing reputation as a distinctive new voice on the British poetry scene. Her short-line stanzas are studded with jewel-like images that accrue into mysterious tales or characters from myth and history.
The first section of the book is devoted to poems on the theme of trees. They show a fine sympathy for the natural word and an understanding of our uses and abuses of trees. In the second section we meet a host of formidable women from myth, including Midas's Daughter, Dido, Cleopatra, Psyche and Medusa. The final, miscellaneous section ranges from the delicate lyric of 'Night Music' to the story of 'The Robbing of the Mantle of Tanit'.
"Poem for poem, Midas' Daughter is a stunning book, the work of a voluptuarist, wordsmith, hex, the best first collection for years"
Michael Hulse, Acumen
"Vuyelwa Carlin's work is eye-catching, stylistically intriguing. Her wilful, dense, sometimes encumbered language owes something to Sylvia Plath but more to Hopkins; it embraces eccentricity and courts whimsy. Pre-occupied by death, Carlin avoids bleakness through the richness and quirkiness of her writing"
Planet
Vuyelwa Carlin was born in South Africa in 1949, brought up in Uganda, and has lived for many years now in Shropshire. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the UK and abroad. She has published three poetry collections to date and has won prizes in both the Cardiff and National Poetry Competitions. She is also a Hawthornden Fellow. For the past five years she as worked as a carer in an EMI (Elderly Mentally Infirm) unit.
The first section of the book is devoted to poems on the theme of trees. They show a fine sympathy for the natural word and an understanding of our uses and abuses of trees. In the second section we meet a host of formidable women from myth, including Midas's Daughter, Dido, Cleopatra, Psyche and Medusa. The final, miscellaneous section ranges from the delicate lyric of 'Night Music' to the story of 'The Robbing of the Mantle of Tanit'.
"Poem for poem, Midas' Daughter is a stunning book, the work of a voluptuarist, wordsmith, hex, the best first collection for years"
Michael Hulse, Acumen
"Vuyelwa Carlin's work is eye-catching, stylistically intriguing. Her wilful, dense, sometimes encumbered language owes something to Sylvia Plath but more to Hopkins; it embraces eccentricity and courts whimsy. Pre-occupied by death, Carlin avoids bleakness through the richness and quirkiness of her writing"
Planet
Vuyelwa Carlin was born in South Africa in 1949, brought up in Uganda, and has lived for many years now in Shropshire. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the UK and abroad. She has published three poetry collections to date and has won prizes in both the Cardiff and National Poetry Competitions. She is also a Hawthornden Fellow. For the past five years she as worked as a carer in an EMI (Elderly Mentally Infirm) unit.