The Floating Man

By Katharine Towers

Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man, Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory. Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447218272

Katharine Towers

Katharine Towers was born in London and now lives in Derbyshire with her family. She has published two poetry collections, both with Picador. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. A poem from the collection ‘The Way We Go’ appeared as a Poem on the Underground and was also set to music by the composer Laura Stevens. Her second collection The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Katharine’s poems have been broadcast on Radio 3 and Radio 4 and have appeared in several anthologies, as well as in The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London. From 2016 – 2018 Katharine was Poet in Residence at the Cloud Appreciation Society.

Book preview

Man

Amber

There’s an element of truth

in its ancient atmosphere.

So precise, so frail a thought

to hold against the slipshod years.

First Word

for Lucy, found in Ethiopia 1974

Bedded in gentle blankets of dust

you’re dreaming pictures of water

when the young anthropologist

kneels at the unstrung code of your limbs.

Three feet six but no child, he thinks.

You wear the constellation of your bones

as lightly as millions of years in the dunes

and let him caress with the pad of his thumb

the ash from under your arm, stroke

your loosening thigh from its sprocket of knee,

finger and breathe the flown cage of your ribs.

And what of this locket of pre-verbal jaw,

which soon must vouchsafe your first word?

Not wheel or fire, but one you’ve just learned: like desire.

Ash Leaves

The ash leaves fall when they’re still green;

they fall in vivid heaps.

They clothe the ankles of the trees

and as they lie they weep.

For days they grieve and look back to

the ash tree’s empty arms.

They miss the heights, the birds,