Following the success of her T. S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over and award-winning translation of the medieval Pearl, Jane Draycott returns with her fourth collection of poems, The Occupant. With a rhythmic subtlety and metrical poise that have become hallmarks of her verse, Draycott hints at the existence of a world of dreamlike clarity underneath our own. In the National Gallery a gardener cuts away the flower from a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; in an abandoned sanatorium a grand piano dreams of the voices and music of days past, rose-spotted paintwork peeling softly, half-moon fanlights rising, sinking . At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem, The Occupant , draws on scenes proposed but left unwritten in Martinus Nijhoff s Awater. In the stifling summer air, Draycott s occupant trawls the streets of an unnamed city whose dead lanes keep their silence , where the frail expire and pale dogs whimper , as its police post notices: Missing: Have you seen this wind?
Jane Draycott was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet/OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999. In 2002 she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, the year of her second collection, The Night Tree, she was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' list of poets. Her third collection Over (Carcanet/OxfordPoets) was shortlisted for the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize, and her translation of the 14th-century Pearl (Carcanet/OxfordPoets 2011) is a PBS Recommendation and winner of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation. Jane Draycott's other books include No Theatre (Smith/Doorstop 1998, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection), Christina the Astonishing (with Lesley Saunders and Peter Hay, 1998) and Tideway (illustrated by Peter Hay, 2002), both from Two Rivers Press. She lives in Oxfordshire and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster
'Jane Draycott's quiet, meticulous poems inhabit the vague, evanescent world between waking and sleeping. Her vision is of an England half in dream, a Samuel Palmer twilight in which things begin to move into an unexpected focus.' - Times Literary Supplement; 'I've waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline. In fact The Night Tree is the finest collection I've read for ages.' - Guardian; 'Her searching curiosity and wonderful assurance make her an impeccable and central poetic intelligence.' Penelope Shuttle, Manhattan Review
