Late Gifts

Late Gifts is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this book's occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful relationship in terms that are funny and re-energising, his world renewed. The child's future makes more urgent the environmental and political themes which have long been a concern for the poet. Here Price has developed new forms for his subject matter, including striking longer pieces which survey contemporary worlds with arresting imagery and a hypnotic energy, the twin gatherings of prose poems 'Shore Gifts' and 'Shore Thefts', and quieter, meditative poems of elegy and awe-struck praise. As Maureen N. McLane has written, 'He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.'

Richard Price is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library and a tutor at the Poetry School, London. He has published over a dozen books of poetry since his debut in 1993, including Lucky Day (2005), which was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. In 2012 his poem 'Hedge Sparrows' was chosen to represent Team GB in the Olympics project 'The Written World'. A year later, Small World (2012) won the Creative Scotland Award in his home country. It was followed by another Guardian Book of the Year, Moon for Sale (2017), which was also shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year. Price's re-telling of Inuit stories in The Owner of the Sea (2021) was a Scotsman Book of the Year.