Prince Rupert's Drop

Draycott Jane

"Prince Rupert's drop", a rare curiosity of the glass-making process, is a tear of glass at once immensely resilient yet spectacularly fragile, exploding dramatically when shattered. This tension – between the present beauty and the sense of inevitable loss inherent in the things we most admire – is a key to many of the poems in Jane Draycott's work, particularly to the long central poem "Braving the Dark", written after her brother's death from AIDS at the age of 30.

This is Jane Draycott's first collection of poems. It follows a pamphlet, No Theatre, that was a first-stage winner of the Poetry Business Competition (1996) and was most unusually shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 1997. She is also the co-author of "Christina the Astonishing" (Two Rivers Press, 1998).

Jane Draycott has lived and taught in London, Strasbourg and Tanzania, and was for a while co-director of a small theatre company, Four Corners. She now works in adult education and lives in Oxfordshire.

About the Author

Jane Draycott was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, "Prince Rupert's Drop" (Carcanet / OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999. In 2002 she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, the year of her second collection, "The Night Tree", she was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's "Next Generation" list of poets. Her third collection "Over" (Carcanet / OxfordPoets) was shortlisted for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize, and her translation of the 14th-century "Pearl" (Carcanet / OxfordPoets 2011) is a PBS Recommendation and winner of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation. Jane Draycott's other books include "No Theatre" (Smith / Doorstop 1998, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection), "Christina the Astonishing" (with Lesley Saunders and Peter Hay, 1998) and "Tideway" (illustrated by Peter Hay, 2002), both from Two Rivers Press. She lives in Oxfordshire and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

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