In Christopher James' mercurial second collection, Seamus Heaney breaks down in a lane, John Lennon haunts the Great Wall of China, and King Midas is spotted somewhere in Herefordshire. Reaching from the Humber to the Thames, from Kashmir to Cromer, it's a dizzying and unpredictable world tour.
In the shadow of environmental disaster and the possibility of dragons, there are more mundane dramas to face too: moving house, family secrets, marriage proposals that do not go to plan, and children woken in the night by rain.
"Amongst new collections I have enjoyed is Christopher James's Farewell to the Earth. James's first collection, The Invention of Butterfly, was rightly much praised when it appeared in 2006. This second collection is marked by the same fertility of invention, blurring the lines between the ordinary and the extraordinary... James is skilled, imaginative and highly readable."
Acumen
Christopher James was born in Scotland in 1975 and educated at Newcastle and UEA, where he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing. He won the National Poetry competition in 2008 with 'Farewell to the Earth', and his other accolades include the 2002 Bridport Prize and the Ledbury Poetry Prize twice, in 2003 and 2006. His previous collection, The Invention of Butterfly (2006), was listed by the Independent as one of its top ten poetry books, and saw him hailed as "the UK's brightest newcomer" by the Poetry Society. He now lives in Suffolk.
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