Little Silver

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, and is literary editor of the Oxford Magazine. 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 later collections from Bloodaxe are Terrestrial Variations (2012), Silent in Finisterre (2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Little Silver (2022). She co-edited the study Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary (Palgrave, 2020) with Adam Hanna.

• 9 Waking10 Inscape11 The Drowning at Porthcurno13 Off-spring14 The Amortals24 Distance Lane25 Foundling26 Lifelines35 Isolation36 Grace37 Out of the Picture38 Negative Space39 Snow and Privet40 Moving the House41 Little Silver44 Charm45 Tall Story46 Homily47 The Silence48 From London far49 Anchorage50 Passage51 Fugue54 Life Sentence55 Definition of Huer56 Stet57 Sometimes I forget you are dead because58 Gone Fishing60 Reading Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis on the Day of the Dead61 Smokey Considers Hilton’s Cat62 Cot Song64 Ghost Rhyme65 Abstraction68 New Year’s Day69 New Atlantis70 Tailpiece

Jane Griffiths is a poet attracted to the cross-hatchings of matter and spirit; inner and outer; air and water; foreignness and a sense of home…she has something of the Dutch still-life painter’s eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint.