Carcanet online book launch: Passion by David Morley

Award-winning poet David Morley is launching his latest collection, Passion, giving us extracts from the new book and chatting about it with another great Carcanet Press-published poet, Sinéad Morrissey (who we recently saw reading at Poets & Players).

Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, Passion offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined. His poems are said to “crackle with verbal energy”, and there are exuberant celebrations of how a yellowhammer inspired Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists, of hummingbirds hovering like actors ‘in a theatre of flowers’, pipistrelles as piccolos, comet-swerving swans, and a Zyzzyx wasp: ‘a zugzwang of six legs and letters’. There’s also an autobiographical sequence, which reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.

An ecologist and naturalist by background, David Morley studied Zoology at the University of Bristol and pursued research on acid rain. He is now a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University, teaching poetry in the Warwick Writing Programme, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. His awards for poetry include the Ted Hughes Award and a Cholmondeley Award. David Morley’s last poetry collection, Fury, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. His earlier books include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, and he wrote the bestselling The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing.

Sinéad Morrissey has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Award (2009, 2013) and the TS Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013. In 2016 she received the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her most recent collection, On Balance (2017), was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

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.