Nicola Healey's debut poetry pamphlet chronicles a complex and lengthy illness - the much-misunderstood condition of anorexia - and the hope to be found in the consolations of nature.
Winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Prize.
A Newer Wilderness gives voice to human powerlessness and existential conflict. Amid loss and oppression, attentiveness to animals and nature's immediate present offers inviolate spaces of life-force and grace, enabling hope, tenacity and a precarious path towards redemption. From a panicked winter fieldfare and the evening star's focused light, to the bare trees and the potent scent of mock orange: wild lives are met in their own voiceless states of flux and continual utterance - humanising, vital forces of intelligence and liberation, and our fragile companions.The title is taken from Emily Dickinson, who feels very much a kindred spirit in these intimate, haunting explorations of a deep and complex reality, in which nature plays a fundamental role in supporting human resilience and survival.