Another Country

Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, and brought up in Holland and Devon. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem 'The House' won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a book-binder in London and Norfolk. Returning to Oxford, she completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. After teaching English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then at the universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, she now teaches at Wadham College, Oxford. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her book Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which included a new collection, Eclogue Over Merlin Street (2008), together with large selections from her previous two Bloodaxe collections, A Grip on Thin Air (2000) and Icarus on Earth (2005), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are Terrestrial Variations (2012), and Silent in Finisterre (2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

'The extraordinary exuberance of Jane Griffiths's poems is a product of their strange balancing between the image and the idea. The images seem to have a verbal life of their own, generated by a dominating thought that the reader is hardly aware of. But then it dawns on you, slowly but unforgettably, and you enjoy the things in the poem all the more when you see what they are for' - Bernard O'Donoghue'Griffiths is an altogether unusual and original kind of contemporary poet. Icarus on Earth is a very rich and rewarding book, one densely packed with intricate and beautiful networks of image and syntax. The sheer ambition of this poetry is worth praising...truly groundbreaking contemporary poetry. Icarus on Earth is the work of a true and valuable artist' - Peter McDonald, PN Review'A major achievement...outstanding...complex and subtle in thought, supple of tone and piercing in its observation - Sarah Broom, Times Literary Supplement