Occupant

Draycott Jane

In galleries and living rooms, on trains and trams and buses, mysterious scenes are briefly illuminated, their occupants caught in "some small act" or dream – in the National Gallery a gardener steals part of a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; on a winter train a commuter invokes their braver, doppelganger self as a fire-fighter; in an abandoned sanatorium the grand piano dreams of former days and waits for a returning patient. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem 'The Occupant' draws on settings proposed but left unwritten by Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff in his great 1934 modernist narrative "Awater". Draycott's new collection, following in Nijhoff's formal laisse monorime footsteps, traces "The Occupant" in a search through the streets of a stifling summer city, where "at tills/ and kiosks police post notices, / Missing: Have you seen this wind?"

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.

Back to the list of books