Over

Draycott Jane

"Over", Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta..." In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflections. She evokes the mirrors and doorways, dreams and night-time journeys that transform the familiar: entrances into a different reality. Over explores liminal places where ocean meets land, land drops to ravine, lives intersect in piazzas. The poems cross thresholds between what is finished and what is "not over yet", between present and past and, in an extract from her new translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl, between a sunlit garden and the mysterious landscape of the world to come.

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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