What Planet

By Miriam Gamble

The poems in Miriam Gamble’s third collection journey surreally through scenes and landscapes at once of the world and of the mind, finding little, as they go, that 'can be claimed self-evident'. By turns uncanny, dark, poignant and uproarious, What Planet sets the individuality of perception and the inventiveness of memory against fixed certainties, probing chaos and madness in a post-truth world. Rhythmically propulsive and dizzyingly inter-connective, Gamble’s new work is as formally adventurous as it is conceptually distinctive, stretching syntax, jumbling the solid and spectral, crossing borders of time and space. Yet this is also a collection pained by loss, and passionate to connect with a life’s 'vacated' corners – even if the act of remembering is as much creation as recovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781780374857

Miriam Gamble

Miriam Gamble was born in Brussels in 1980 and grew up in Belfast. She studied at Oxford and at Queen’s University Belfast, where she completed a PhD in contemporary British and Irish poetry. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007, and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award in 2010. Her pamphlet, This Man's Town, was published by tall-lighthouse in 2007. Her first book-length collection, The Squirrels Are Dead, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010 and won her a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011. Her second collection, Pirate Music, was published by Bloodaxe in 2014, and her third, What Planet, was published by Bloodaxe in 2019. She lectures in creative writing at Edinburgh University.