'Book of Days' with Phoebe Power

This month for Words on Wednesdays, we welcome local lady and poet of national note, Phoebe Power to Verey Books with her new book of poetry, Book of Days, just out with Carcanet Press.

‘Book of Days’ is a long poem recounting a journey along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Animated by chatter, song and conversation, the poem is filled with the stories of other pilgrims encountered on the path – like Ciara, who wants to found a Currency of Kindness, or Patrick, who’s walked from Finland with the ashes of his best friend. We meet shamans, jailors and jewellers, priests and photographers, dancers and healers, from Korea and Ukraine, Brazil, Ireland and more. Threaded among their voices are vivid verbal sketches of landscape and architecture, sustained within a shimmering poetic rhythm which aims to carry its reader in a dream-like and immersive flow. The work explores the possibilities and contradictions of a distinctly twenty-first century pilgrimage: informed by tourism and technology, yet offering forms of fellowship and connection in an age of contemporary individualism and rootlessness.

Phoebe Power’s Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018) received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was further shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Phoebe’s other publications include Sea Change (Guillemot Press, 2021, with Katrina Porteous), an illustrated pamphlet about the Durham coast; and Harp Duet (2016). She currently lives in York though she was raised in Sockbridge, just three miles from Pooley Bridge – and now she’s back at Verey Books.

phoebepowerpoetry.wordpress.com
@PhoebePower