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THE LATEST COLLECTION BY JACQUELINE SAPHRA
Velvel's Violin
Velvel’s Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement and migration.
Saphra’s precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes.
Between each poem - forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins - sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.
BIO
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Jacqueline is T.S. Eliot Prize nominated, award-winning poet, a playwright, editor, agitator, teacher and organiser. She is the author of ten stage plays, four chapbooks and five collections. Jacqueline is a keen performer and collaborator, working with composers, musicians, visual artists and other poets. She offers mentoring and teaches poetry in all kinds of settings including The Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School.
Her fifth collection Velvel’s Violin will be out from Nine Arches Press in July 2023.
Reviews & Testimonials
‘The ambivalence of loss and longing ... is achieved through the kind of lovely contraption that all these poems are, finely tuned and outstanding in performance, some of them real classics’
(The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions)
'a masterclass in how poetry shapes and contributes to our understanding of the world. ….We all lived through lockdown. We all shared the experience. Like most successful poetry, this taps into what we already know; its magic is to take the vague and groping, and snap it into clarity.’
(One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets)
‘Sometimes subversive, sometimes moving, always reflective and insightful … these intimate sketches of life are true gems’
(All My Mad Mothers)
PETER DANIELS,
INK, SWEAT AND TEARS
STELLA BACKHOUSE,
HCE MAGAZINE
JULIE IRIGARAY, MSLEXIA
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