Blue Book

Welsh poet, Owen Sheers's first collection has already garnered much critical acclaim. He was selected by The Times as Poet of the New Millennium, and this book won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award, given to first collections. At once, an exquisite observation of the life-affirming landscape that surrounds him, Sheers' poetry too describes the fruitless cruelty and suffering caused by human frailty. The ghost of death looms large in many of the poems, where memory and language struggle to contend with the enormity of emotion. And yet, his own language is driven by the need to get to the root of physical life and emotion -- his language raw and organic, eschewing the traditional aesthetics of nature with sensual and faithful evocations. This is a new collection of significant poetic value and resonance.

Owen Sheers was born in 1974, spent a portion of his childhood abroad, then returned to live on a farm in Abergavenny when he was nine. Educated at Oxford, with an MA in Creative Writing from the UEA writing programme, he has worked in television in London and Wales. He hit the limelight in 2000 when for The Times of January 1st, 2000, David Bailey photographed the foremost practitioners in the arts and sciences together with their choice of the person they expected to carry the discipline forward: Poet Laureate Andrew Motion selected Owen Sheers as the poet to watch. His first collection, The Blue Book, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize Best First Collection and ACW Book of the Year 2001. Skirrid Hill, his second collection, won a Somerset Maugham Prize in 2006 and was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year. Owen Sheers was recently appointed as the first-ever artist in residence for the Welsh Rugby Union.

Welsh poet, Owen Sheers's first collection has already garnered much critical acclaim. He was selected by The Times as Poet of the New Millennium, and this book won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award, given to first collections. At once, an exquisite observation of the life-affirming landscape that surrounds him, Sheers' poetry too describes the fruitless cruelty and suffering caused by human frailty. The ghost of death looms large in many of the poems, where memory and language struggle to contend with the enormity of emotion. And yet, his own language is driven by the need to get to the root of physical life and emotion -- his language raw and organic, eschewing the traditional aesthetics of nature with sensual and faithful evocations. This is a new collection of significant poetic value and resonance.

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