The Shipwrecked House - Softcover

These are serious, visually stunning poems of nationality, history and memory, but they're personal and generous in their wit. Reading them is like spending an hour in the company of someone you secretly admire. - Luke Kennard

Anchors, shipwrecks, whales and islands abound in this first collection by young Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trevien. These poems are sketches, lyrics, dreams, and experiments in language as sound. Trevien's is a surreal vision, steeped in myth and music, in which everything is alive and - like the sea itself - constantly shifting form. Fishermen become owls; one woman turns into a snake, another gives birth to a tree; a glow-worm might be a wasp or 'a toy on standby'. Struck through with brilliant and sometimes sinister imagery reminiscent of Pan's Labyrinth or an Angela Carter novel, The Shipwrecked House is a unique and hallucinatory debut from a poet-to-watch.