Sculling

This is a book of watersheds - love, death and rivers - and once you slip in to its beguiling flow, you don’t want it to end. Poised, fecund and inventive, Dumont’s poetry speaks to these times - with a visceral sense of how it is to navigate fracture, interrogate the unfathomable elements and attempt to live a joined-up life. – Linda France, author of StartlingThis is writing as sure and complex as the flow of water, weaving its wide reflections on the world, on place, on family, on natural processes and the sheer play of language, always with the steady tug of the personal story beneath – Philip Gross, prize-winning poet and authorIf you like getting into a canoe, but sometimes struggle getting into contemporary poetry, this could be the book you have been waiting for… This is a tightly knit collection, and subsequent poems continue the theme of water - there’s a stunning memory map of Exeter quay, instructions on how to right a kayak, botanies of the riverbank and a universal declaration of river rights… you will emerge cleansed, and reminded that human beings are 60% water * Guardian *The tragic backstory of Sophie Dumont’s Sculling gives the whole collection an unearthly glow… More than just a portrait of grief, Sculling plays with metaphor while paying sober attention to the state of the nation’s waterways * Financial Times *

Sophie Dumont is a poet and copywriter based in Bristol and Bath. Her poetry won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize and has appeared in The Rialto, Magma, The Moth, Ink Sweat and Tears and Mslexia among others. Dumont has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has held writing residencies along Bristol Harbourside with Boat Poets and Exeter Quay through Literature Works.