A.F. Harrold’s new collection is a sequence detailing the illness and death of his mother, but its tone is anything but elegiac. Addressed to the patient, both present and absent, the poems are frank, unflinching and honest. There is love here, but also frustration, bewilderment, confusion and grief. Together the poems explore the spaces where despair, boredom and exhaustion meet, and at their heart describe the difficulty of dying.
“Profoundly moving, utterly uncompromising, the poems... are alive to the absurdities and contradictions that underwrite human tragedies.”
Helen Mort
“He enters the territory between this world and whatever comes after it, writing so clearly and tenderly about death, memory and love...”
Catherine Smith
“He has Larkin’s ability to evoke and transcend mundane reality.”
David Cooke, The North
A.F. Harrold was born in 1975. His books include the Bloomsbury novel for children Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away From The Circus (And Joined The Library) (2012), and the Two Rivers Press poetry collections Logic and the Heart (2004), Postcards from the Hedgehog (2007) and Flood (2010). He lives in Reading.