The Magic of What's There

In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. 'Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend', he writes in 'After a Song by Gustav Mahler'. In The Magic of What's There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy.

David Morley won the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry in 2016 for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems and a Cholmondeley Award for his contribution to poetry. His collections include The Gypsy and the Poet, a PBS Recommendation and Morning Star Book of the Year; Enchantment, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year; The Invisible Kings, a PBS Recommendation and TLS Book of the year. A dramatic long poem The Death of Wisdom Smith, Prince of Gypsies has been published by The Melos Press. He is Professor at Warwick University and Monash University, Melbourne.