Biographical note
David Morley’s latest book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other books from Carcanet Press include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year. David pioneered podcasting in creative writing through his Slow Poetry and Writing Challenges spoken word projects. He is a professor at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
Publisher details at Carcanet
https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784109905
Reviews
‘In FURY, Morley’s concerns combine as never before into a keening, politicised call to pay attention to the missing, the lost, and the deliberately elided […] Morley’s trademark fusion of Romani and English “Angloromani” forges afresh his lyric gifts’
Sinead Morrissey, PBS Bulletin For Poetry Book Society Choice
‘Like opening a box of fireworks, something theatrical happens when you open its pages … Ted Hughes wrote about the natural, magical, and mythical world; The Invisible Gift is a natural successor.’
Ali Smith, Andrew McMillan & Jackie Kay, Ted Hughes Award judges.
‘David Morley’s FURY is published by Carcanet. Sonnets meet pantoums in this festival of loves and voices, the air is full of birds, fury meets gentleness, and every poem is deeply interested in what language makes of us… FURY controls its furies with ever inventive craftsmanship.’
Alexandra Harris, Chair of Judges, The Forward Prize
‘A rich and musical collection with a sharp political bite… there’s something magical about reading the poems first for the sheer verbal play of the language, the sparking, luminous sounds it makes in the mouth and paints on the mind… FURY has an enormous range, and handles its politics with sensitivity and power’
Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times
‘The poems of FURY are acts of radical connection across cultures and language… FURY comes with a hard political edge too, in elegies for cultural loss: “All the nameless people named here. / The story ends with who we were.”‘
Aingeal Clare, The Guardian
‘In this daring new collection, Morley holds a mirror up to the myriad of irresponsible ways that we as humans influence the natural world and how we treat one another… Threaded with Romanes – as Morley’s poems often are – this is a celebration of the Roma tongue as well as the people and places gone by… To read Fury is to tread a pilgrimage along the oldest putèka. To know these paths is to be compelled to walk them again, to feel the trembling pride for our ethnicity and to sing once more of home.’
Jo Clement, Travellers Times
‘David Morley takes us on a voyage to the other half of his heritage. In a serial masterpiece of macaronic verse, he shows us a life intimate with our own…yet more deeply Other than romantic fairytales or even authentic music from Spain and Eastern Europe had suggested it might be. He holds our world up to a language mostly kept secret up to now…the refraction of the familiar is dizzying yet often moving.’
Les Murray