Carcanet online book launch: Charlotte Eichler

Charlotte Eichler launches her debut collection, Swimming Between Islands, with an online event hosted by Carcanet Press and fellow poet Rebecca Goss. The hour-long event will feature readings and discussion as Charlotte introduces audience members to her work, a selection of which featured in the New Poetries VIII anthology published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press in 2021 – responding to these, Laura Scott (who you can catch at another Carcanet event, reading alongside AE Stallings at Blackwell’s on 6 February) said: “Read Charlotte Eichler’s poems slowly, so that you can really take note of them, because they’re astonishing.”

Anthony Vahni Capildeo characterised Charlotte Eichler’s Their Lunar Language as “modern pastoral, not nostalgic, and well beyond the ordinary domestic lyric” and said she “creates a powerful authorial perspective, not mistakable for any other voice”.

Originally from Hertfordshire and now based near Leeds, Charlotte Eichler’s award-winning poetry has appeared in Anthropocene, And Other Poems, Blackbox Manifold, PN Review, Stand, The Manchester Review and The Rialto. She studied English Literature and Russian at the University of Nottingham, followed by an MA in Norse and Viking Studies, also from Nottingham. Her debut pamphlet, Their Lunar Language, came out with Valley Press in 2018 and was chosen as a book of the year by the Poetry School, who said she has “a voice that deserves to be heard in this increasingly fractured world, in which so much is at stake”.

Carcanet poet Anthony Vahni Capildeo characterised Charlotte Eichler’s Their Lunar Language as “modern pastoral, not nostalgic, and well beyond the ordinary domestic lyric” and said she “creates a powerful authorial perspective, not mistakable for any other voice”. Swimming Between Islands gathers this work together with a substantial collection of new poems, which the publisher says: “…has its own distinctive weathers, atmospheres and fauna. Egg collectors, moth trappers, hermits, cuttlefish, pyjama sharks and bloody henry starfish all play a part. This islanded world is the starting point for poems that explore how we try to connect with each other – despite misunderstanding, family silences and unwanted legacies.”

“In Eichler’s poems, the first person singular is relational, social; it refuses to mark one consciousness neatly off from another. The poems’ perspective is often plural, a ‘we’ which is one minute a couple considering marriage, the next, childhood friends divining the future from ladybirds and four-leafed clovers. The reader is invited to come close, and then right into the centre of the poem; the book progresses towards ever wilder, more isolated places in Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, where ‘we are found: / the gannets are white flares / hitting the water / under a fishbone sky’.”

Rebecca Goss is a poet, tutor and mentor living in Suffolk. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published by Flambard Press in 2010. Her second collection, Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection, won the Poetry category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2013, and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. In 2014, Rebecca was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets. Her second pamphlet Carousel, a collaboration with the photographer Chris Routledge, was published by Guillemot Press in 2018. Rebecca’s third full-length collection, Girl, was published with Carcanet/Northern House in 2019 and shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards 2019. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University and a PhD by Publication from the University of East Anglia. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge 2020-22 and at the University of Suffolk 2022-23.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.