Carcanet online book launch: The Face in the Well by Rebecca Watts

Rebecca Watts launches her “vibrant third collection” The Face in the Well, out with Manchester’s Carcanet Press and hosted by the University of Manchester Centre for New Writing’s Vona Groarke.

In The Face in the Well, Rebecca Watts shines a light on the tender, spontaneous, creative and creaturely aspects of the self, and asks how we might nurture and shield these from the many physical, psychological and social forces predisposed to keep them down. It is described as “a resonant exploration of childhood, desire, conflict and the animal nature of the self”, with poems that “weave and dart between a wide range of forms: supple free-verse lines go hand in hand with wistful songs, uncompromising incantations and highly charged epigrams”.

“Wearing a variety of costumes, or none at all, the characters in these dramatic poems play hide-and-seek, guarding their vulnerabilities while yearning for greater connection with others and the world. Animals, as totems and spirit guides, swim, run and fly across the pages. Children tiptoe and improvise their way through landscapes designed to curtail and bewilder them. Adults curate their own funerals, befriend spiders, try to love each other, and go to war. Poets and other heroes – Brontë, Heaney, Plath, Yeats, Mary Poppins – are confronted, reflected, refracted and left echoing anew.”

A selection of Rebecca Watts’ poetry was included in Carcanet‘s 2015 anthology New Poetries VI and her debut poetry collection The Met Office Advises Caution was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation when it came out in 2016, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize and named as one of the Guardian and Financial Times’s Best Books of 2016. She famously had beef with the popularity of writers such as Rupi Kaur and Hollie McNish, describing their poetry as ‘consumer-driven content’ in PN Review in 2018.

Her second collection, Red Gloves, was published in 2020 – praised by Colm Tóibín, it won a Gladstone’s Library Writers-in-Residence Award. Rebecca has completed Fellowships with the Hawthornden Foundation and the Royal Literary Fund, and received awards for works in progress from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, the Society of Authors and Arts Council England. In 2019 she edited Elizabeth Jennings: New Selected Poems for Carcanet. Born in Suffolk, she lives in Cambridge, where she works as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and freelance writer, editor and tutor.

Vona Groarke has published 13 books with The Gallery Press, including eight original poetry collections, and two translations from the Irish, most recently Woman of Winter (2023), a version of the much-loved Irish poem usually known in English as ‘The Lament of the Hag of Beare’. She published Hereafter: the Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara with New York University Press (2022). A Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library 2018-19, former editor of Poetry Ireland Review and selector for the UK’s Poetry Book Society, she has taught at the University of Manchester since 2007. She is the current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge, and otherwise lives in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland.

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.