The Visitations - Softcover

The Visitations is the new book of poems by Kathryn Simmonds, the follow-up to her Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. As with her previous collection, an appealing voice prevails, though this simplicity is something of a veil, through which the author, with subtle shifts of language and perspective, manages to imply darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone is often simultaneously satirical and elegiac and the collection abounds with sudden moments of strange illumination: a lime tree strikes up a conversation; a life coach finds an old passport; an infant teeters on the brink of speech. Here are poems where the physical and metaphysical meet, where questions of new motherhood are set against those of faith, and the larger conundrum of how to live.

Kathryn Simmonds first book of poetry Sunday at the Skin Launderette won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2008. She is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. Love and Fallout is her first novel and was a finalist in the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize before it was published. In 2013-14 she was the first poet-in-residence at the Charles Causley Trust in Launceston, Cornwall.