Missing Fay

A mysterious haunting novel starring a cast of brilliant eccentrics bound together by a missing girl

Twenty-five years on from his spectacular debut novel, Ulverton, Thorpe has produced a book that resembles and rivals it… With tremendous flair, Thorpe opens up a vista of present-day middle England.

An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart.

Missing Fay…presents entwined provincial lives with illuminating precision, its prose textured, its structure intricate… He is alert to every English linguistic twitch, every slippery folk-meme. He’s a writer’s writer, and I wish he were a reader’s writer too.

Is Thorpe Britain’s most underrated writer? Having just re-read his 1992 classic novel Ulverton, I say he has to be in the running

Thorpe is a master of quiet ironies, of exquisite detail… This is a mysterious, lucent novel, compelling in its tautness, devastating in its wisdom. I hope it wins prizes.

Not only Britain’s most underrated writer, he is also among the most original… [Missing Fay] is believable, human, sustained by characterisation, nuanced prose and a robust, natural humanity all of its own. Further evidence, as if needed, that Adam Thorpe is a very fine writer indeed. Novelists don’t have to be accomplished poets, yet it clearly helps.

Missing Fay is a book of lives… Thorpe draws each character with economy, empathy, depth of perception and, notwithstanding the subject matter, great humour… He presents human existence in all its isolation and odd interconnectedness, and he does so with a poet’s eye for language, a short-story writer’s gift for compassion and a novelist’s overarching perspective. He is one of modern English fiction’s standout talents.

If the missing girl trope belongs to crime fiction, the ambiguity here makes for a richer and more haunting experience. There are plenty of suspects, and a second read reveals connections you won’t get on the first. The mystery of the missing girl cleverly connects lives that rarely intersect… Thorpe’s teeming free-indirect style interweaves a tapestry of prejudices… This is a clear-sighted work of art. With great empathy it imagines lives which, hidden from each other, are revealed in their common causes to the reader; if Thorpe is right, a better world, while unlikely, is possible.

One of those rare writers who can do the magic of completely disappearing and letting his characters…speak for themselves… Thorpe is not a regular fixture on literary prize shortlists. Surely that will change with this engrossing, unforgettable work of wonder.

Adam Thorpe’s superb new novel will put this gifted novelist back on the map... A tour-de-force of depth and nuance... Missing Fay is superb on many levels... A vivid portrait of a particular locality, a psychological study of overlapping lives, a pitch-perfect piece of ventriloquism...and a sweeping conspectus of contemporary concerns.

Thorpe’s ability to inhabit [his] disparate characters is hugely impressive, and he excels at charting the often volatile mood swings within a relationship.

Adam Thorpe is a wonderfully sympathetic novelist with a keen eye and alert ear... You cannot but admire and enjoy his ability to portray such a variety of people and to explore the randomness of barely-connected experiences. It’s a novel that demands, and deserves, to be read slowly, with close attention.

Missing Fay is a welcome and timely work about loneliness and alienation in a rootless, restless England. In years to come, when we are trying to understand the complexities that led from “Broken Britain” to Brexit, this thoughtful, unsettling and intricate novel may well provide some of the answers.

A vibrant ensembles piece unfolding around the disappearance of a teenage girl… Missing Fay… inhabits each of its characters one chapter at a time – a...vivid approach that affords a steady pulse of dramatic irony as well as a measure of suspense… [A] rich novel of loose ends.

There is no typical Adam Thorpe novel… Missing Fay defies categorisation and shows off his finest literary tricks.

Fluent and prolific, he ranges easily between voices and subjects… threaded together with care and panache… Most of the men in the novel…entertain fantasies about vulnerable women… In Missing Fay, Thorpe attempts, with typical self-effacement, to give them a voice of their own.

It’s wry, visceral, angry and wise.

If you believe that English fiction is jaded, you must read Adam Thorpe

An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart, about a lost teenager in a lost England.

An upmarket take on the Gone Girl mystery.

With tremendous flair, Thorpe opens up a vista of present-day middle England.

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992, and he has published two books of stories, six poetry collections, and nine further novels, most recently Flight (2012). 
 
 
www.adamthorpe.net

'An intricately crafted novel, sharp-eared, current and full of heart' Guardian, Books of the Year 
 
A spirited fourteen-year-old, Fay, goes missing from a Lincoln council estate. Is she a runaway, or a victim – another face on a poster gradually fading with time? The story of her last few days before she vanishes is interwoven with the varied lives of six locals – all touched in life-changing ways. 
 
 David is on a family holiday on the bleak Lincolnshire coast; Howard, a retired steel worker with some dodgy friends; Cosmina, a Romanian immigrant; Sheena, middle-aged and single, running a kiddies’ clothes shop; Mike, owner of a second-hand bookshop and secretly in love with Cosmina; and Chris, a TV-producer-become-monk struggling to leave the ordinary world behind. All are involuntary witnesses to the lost girl; paths cross, threads touch, connections are made or lost. Is Fay alive or dead? Or somewhere in between?

The Rules Of Perspective

It is April 1945, and the historic town of Lohenfelde is about to be overrun by the Allied Third Army. Huddled in the vaults of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum are Heinrich Hoffer and his three colleagues. Their petty rivalries and resentments surface quickly in this claustrophobic confinement as the four prepare themselves for their fate. 
 
Above the ground, picking through the rubble, is Corporal Neal Parry, who wishes he was back in West Virginia studying art. When he finds an exquisite painting in what remains of the museum vaults, he is immediately reconnected with a lost world of beauty and order. It is this small 18th-century oil that is the poignant link between the young American soldier and the four charred corpses he finds at the same time. As the narratives interweave, the story of the painting reveals the hidden story of Herr Hoffer and his three associates - and in doing so uncovers other, darker mysteries.

Flight

A breakneck, knuckle-whitening thriller, written with absolute brilliance - pooh to the Man Booker judges if this is not on the shortlist - Kate Saunders, The Times

In Flight's slick plot and its testosterone-fuelled characters, Thorpe has found a fresh way of looking at corruption and betrayal, and the sticky web that is flung across the world, connecting drug and arms dealers, and all shades of mortals in between

This book is so much better written than most thrillers that it's almost ridiculous

A gripping thriller from its first sentence…. Thorpe is a craftsman as well as an artist, and the book is well put together, with respect for the genre. Like William Boyd, Thorpe is a thorough professional. Thorpe convincingly portrays a world in which the means of communication have shrunk the world and made privacy hard to secure

Flight blends an unlikely cocktail of genres with great success – think 007 as a middle-aged dad you’re halfway there

An excellently plotted book boosted by some fine writing

Thorpe’s skill is with sharply observed characters… Taut and compelling

A well-written and exciting Boy’s Own tale for adults

Bob Winrush was a freight dog, flying consignments of goods and sometimes people to all the corners of the world.Until, one day, he walked away from a deal that didn't smell right - something a 'freight dog’ should never do. 
 
Now working as a private pilot for an Emirate prince in Dubai, he finds that moment of refusal catching up with him. Caught between those who want to find out more and those who want to cover their traces, he becomes a marked man, and flees to a remote Scottish island. Pursued by both armed assassins and a ruinous, bitter divorce, he struggles to re-fashion himself in this barren, beautiful place, taking on another identity. 
 
But back in the world of smuggled AK-47s and heroin, the stakes are rising. Even in the furthest Hebrides his past catches up with him, and the predators are closing in.

Ulverton

The sensational debut novel by Adam Thorpe, now regarded as a 20th century classic.

If you believe English fiction is jaded, you must read Adam Thorpe... Tender, precise, tragicomic and unsentimental.

We arent used to the many deep matters Thorpe touches on, not to such a thorough grasp of the complex nature of our rural past, and through it, of all existence itself... Suddenly English lives again

These stories sing like psalms, robust and vibrant - a poet's novel and a celebration that no social historian would dare attempt

A superb and moving meditation on history, fate and the nature of time, Ulverton is at once a traditional fiction and a wholly successful testing of the limits of literary art

Spanning three centuries and encompassing a startling variety of lives, this debut novel from poet Adam Thorpe is nothing less than a bravura performance... With Ulverton, Thorpe has woven his own enticing 'secret web'. This is no mere promising first novel, but a major work, heralding a brillant new voice in British fiction

Beneath the variety of Ulverton's episodes is the current that links them, and that makes this one of the great British fictional works of our time. Each voice gives us a richly accomplished story; as one voice follows another, we are given the waxing and waning of history, of the land, and of the ways in which society regards itself and the world it disposes of

A masterpiece...he has done a thing I would literally have given my right arm to do

Immerse yourself in the stories of Ulverton, as heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime 
 
'Sometimes you forget that it is a novel, and believe for a moment that you are really hearing the voice of the dead' Hilary Mantel 
 
At the heart of this novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton. It is the fixed point in a book that spans three hundred years. Different voices tell the story of Ulverton: one of Cromwell's soldiers staggers home to find his wife remarried and promptly disappears, an eighteenth century farmer carries on an affair with a maid under his wife's nose, a mother writes letters to her imprisoned son, a 1980s real estate company discover a soldier's skeleton, dated to the time of Cromwell... 
 
 Told through diaries, sermons, letters, drunken pub conversations and film scripts, this is a masterful novel that reconstructs the unrecorded history of England. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM ROBERT MACFARLANE

Voluntary

A new collection of poetry from one of England's most gifted writers.

He writes like a man in love with language, with the sheer possibilities of words. His work is musical, brimming with slant rhyme and assonance, and also subtle in its effects...dazzling

Best known for poetry and fiction that digs deep into the mythic layers of the English landscape, he weaves together past and present, grief and wonder, with delicacy and grace

Thorpe’s language is musical, open-hearted and extremely polished…this book as a whole is almost novelistic in its thematic quality, bringing forth ideas about time, presence and absence

From an abandoned rowing boat in Estonia full of wild flowers to a swimming pool in the Congo full of drowned insects, Adam Thorpe's new collection takes us on a wide-ranging journey through states of gain and loss, alienation and belonging. In the title poem, the poet disturbs a flock of geese by his mere presence, and one goose takes the wrong direction, away from the flock, as a 'voluntary exile'. A bid for freedom, or a mistake? 
 
These poems explore our chances, record our traces - in the marks on skin, home movies, stone walls, the pressure of our blood, or the clearing of a dying father's study: 'foraging backwards' until something is revealed, however tentative. As always in Thorpe's work, history's violence lurks in the margins: in the silent oppression of Roman roads, a polluting pipeline in Africa or the bombing of the Alcala train, he takes the gauge of our wider compulsions, of all that decides things for us. Against this he sets what, through the other meaning of 'voluntary', suggests chance's extempore music: the gleeful play of a sea-otter, the extraordinary gift of a passing gull to his small daughter, or poetry itself. 
 
Adam Thorpe is now celebrated as a novelist, but he began as a poet. Voluntary, his sixth collection, is a timely reminder of the elegance, skill and remarkable range of this most gifted British poet.

Pieces Of Light

A fascinating fictional investigation into the resonance of the past, both personal and ancient.

Hugh Arkwright's remote childhood in the Central African bush, and its sudden disruption, leaves him with a legacy of magic, mystery, and tragic loss. Late in his life, he returns to the gaunt house in Ulverton where he was brought up by his eccentric uncle, and finds that the old ghosts still walk. The more he excavates his own past, the deeper he finds the traces of ancient horrors. The autumnal air of Ulverton begins to take on the taint of corruption, and a mystery starts that ends with vengeance, murder and a sudden, staggering revelation. The mild English manners of the village of darkness beneath the heart of oak. PIECES OF LIGHT is a modern novel steeped in a resonant past; where rural England and colonial Africa collide. Densely wrought and vividly imagined, Adam Thorpe's return to Ulverton is a fictional triumph - thrilling and unforgettable.

Hodd

A brilliant new novel from a truly great writer - a return in style to his great novel Ulverton. Hodd is an historical novel which thrillingly uncovers the real story of Robin Hood.

Adam Thorpe's novel is richly enjoyable on many levels...no prior knowledge of the Robin Hood legend is necessary to appreciate the lustrous prose, the humanity and the exuberant inventiveness of this strange and lovely book

Extraordinary narrative...gripping and unrelenting in its remarkable portrayal of the underside of medieval society...no-one who reads this will think of Robin Hood and his merry men in quite the same way again

A fascinating and complex novel - as remarkable in its way as Ulverton

A testament to Thorpe's talent as a storyteller... Medieval England, in all its brutality, is brought vividly to life by Thorpe's insight and impressive scholarship

A tour de force around an elusive thirteenth-century figure who may, or may not, have been the original fantasy Robin Hood we think we know and love. Let's hope this year's Booker lot are up to estimating this wonderfully subtle and layered book at its true worth

Who was Robin Hood? Romantic legend casts him as outlaw, archer, and hero of the people, living in Sherwood Forest with Friar Tuck, Little John and Maid Marian, stealing from the rich to give to the poor - but there is no historical proof to back this up. The early ballads portray a quite different figure: impulsive, violent, vengeful, with no concern for the needy, no merry band, and no Maid Marian. 
 
Hodd provides a possible answer to this famous question, in the form of a medieval document rescued from a ruined church on the Somme, and translated from the original Latin. The testimony of an anonymous monk, it describes his time as a boy in the greenwood with a half-crazed bandit called Robert Hodd - who, following the thirteenth-century principles of the 'heresy of the Free Spirit', believes himself above God and beyond sin. Hodd and his crimes would have been forgotten without the boy's minstrel skills, and it is the old monk's cruel fate to know that not only has he given himself up to apostasy and shame, but that his ballads were responsible for turning a murderous felon into the most popular outlaw hero and folk legend of England, Robin Hood. 
 
Written with his characteristic depth and subtlety, his sure understanding of folklore, his precise command of detail, Adam Thorpe's ninth novel is both a thrilling re-examination of myth and a moving reminder of how human innocence and frailty fix and harden into history.

From The Neanderthal

Verve and intelligence... a beauty of feeling and language.

Excellent... Thorpe's poems are finely scored for the voice, but they go beyond the recognisable into the mystical.

Erudite, observant, an artist with the language.

It's hard to imagine greater skill or concision... There are never going to be many poets in any generation who leave you strapped for superlatives; excitingly, Thorpe is one of them.

The poems in Adam Thorpe's latest collection are concerned with the continuum between two worlds: the lived present and the felt past. With the attentive care of an archaeologist he uncovers and examines fragments - from a personal history or the historic past - and rebuilds the narrative: a fossil in Hitler's stadium, a wedding photograph, marks on the wall where an eighteenth-century priest was shot. With formal dexterity and rhythmic assurance, these versatile, subtle poems investigate the vertiginous dynamic of history - where a shard of stone stands for civilisation, where a silver of memory becomes a life re-lived. After nine years, during which time he has emerged as one of Britain's most powerful and innovative novelists, Adam Thorpe now returns - triumphantly - to poetry.

The Standing Pool

A thrilling novel - from the author of Ulverton and Between Each Breath - about an English family out of their depth in the wilds of rural France.

Superior novel...wincingly precise in his imagery and technically adept... An electric and darkly gleeful read

An immensely clever, tragicomic novel...a rich meditation on past and present colonial politics... What resonates for me is what I greatly admire in all Thorpe's work: the complex depth, and the texture and poetry of his storytelling language

An intimate depiction of family life... Vivid and luminous

Because this is Adam Thorpe, there are only two things you know for certain: that the writing will be gorgeous, silky-smooth; and that the plot will be entirely original, defying categorisation...enjoy

An intricate fiction which reminds us gently that war wrecks lives in ways too tangled to anticipate

Two Cambridge academics, the historians Nick and Sarah Mallinson, take a sabbatical with their three small and lively girls in a remote Languedoc farmhouse. But the farmhouse contains its own histories, far darker and murkier than the Mallinsons are used to dealing with. As the illusion of Eden retreats, the couple begin to feel the vulnerability of being among strangers...

Between Each Breath

A powerful, timely novel from the highly acclaimed author of Ulverton and The Rules of Perspective

Adam Thorpe is brilliant. Utterly brilliant. I use the word advisedly, OED advisedly, the best a man can get... the book moved me so much that the denouement made me cry... Thorpe, I believe, may be so ambitious, so brilliant, he's actually trying to rewrite Flaubert

Magnificent... A deftly plotted love story, full of startling disclosures, the novel draws one in irresistibly... Adam Thorpe is a marvel among contemporary British novelists, and we are lucky to have him

This is recognisably a poet's book, stuffed with small luminous details and off-kilter observations and permanently alert to the strange texture of things...a hugely enjoyable book by a writer at the top of his game who's demonstrably still having great fun doing what he does. Long may that continue

Brilliant... It is a rich book: sensuous, thoughtful and sad

Thorpe demonstrates the foresight and guile of the seasoned storyteller, coupled with a poet's ability to knock the language for six... Between Each Breath is funny, well-observed and thought-provoking

Jack Middleton, once 'England's most promising young composer' now lives comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress. Jack is no longer young nor has he ever quite fulfilled his remarkable promise. And then he visits Estonia, in search of inspiration, and falls for a young waitress, Kaja. Six childless years on and Jack and Milly's marriage shows the strain, but they battle on better than most - until the past returns with a vengeance...

Is This The Way You Said?

A short story collection from the highly acclaimed author of Ulverton and The Rules of Perspective.

In Is This The Way You Said? we see the perfection of deprecation, spurred by wit, watered by pity, fed by observation. It's marvellous

Full of humour and warmth, this is an impressive, at times brilliant, work

Thorpe's precise prose never wastes a word; he inhabits a variety of complex characters effortlessly and is extremely funny and moving by turns. A real treat

What raises both story and collection to the highest level is the combination of Thorpe's extraordinarily keen ear, sharp humour and a remarkable, direct prose that is not only suited to the way his people think, but also provides the perfect foil to those moments of tentative poetry that spark and burn from time to time in even the dullest of English lives

There is grace and strength to Adam Thorpe's writing that reminds me of Tai Chi... Beautifully observed tales

Celebrated as a novelist of breathtaking historical range and depth, Adam Thorpe is also an accomplished and celebrated writer of short fiction, and the stories collected here show his deftness with character, his enormous versatility of voice. 
 
In the title story, an expectant first-time novelist meets the publisher who has asked him to lunch, only to find himself drawn, unwittingly and inexorably, into a terrible personal tragedy. In 'The Concert Interval' Rob, an orchestral tympanist, sees his life crumble over the half-time coffee and sandwiches. In 'Heavy Shopping' a business executive is called in the middle of an important conference in Scotland with the news that his wife has given birth prematurely; his inability to cope with the resulting divided loyalties, and the way he deals with his own passive indecisiveness, reveals the terrifying emotional vacuum in his life. 
 
Exquisitely written, these stories breathe life into their characters, exposing their deepest desires, their catastrophic fears, their perilous frailty in the face of the responsibilities they carry; they are the work of one of Britain's most important writers, working at the height of his powers.

Birds With A Broken Wing

A powerful fifth poetry collection coinciding with the publication of Adam Thorpe's novel, Between Each Breath.

[He] writes like a man in love with language, with the sheer possibilities of words. His work is musical, brimming with slant rhyme and assonance, and also subtle in its effects

The essential element about Thorpe the poet is that he is unusual among many contemporaries for possessing a superbly honed ear for the cadences of language and speech

Thorpe's poems are finely scored for the voice, but they go beyond the recognisable into the mystical

There are never going to be many poets in any generation who leave you strapped for superlatives; excitingly, Thorpe is one of them

Adam Thorpe's fifth collection finds purpose in the discarded, the secretive, the failed. Juxtaposing creation and destruction, hope and grief - a small boy deep down a lead mine; an unlit, nocturnal path set against the 'insomniac' motorway; industrialised apples against wrinkled windfalls - his poems argue for bewilderment and 'the slight bruise of doubt'. 
 
Whether walking an abandoned road or considering a friend's suicide, his poems remind us of our abdications, of our collapsed relationships with nature, with history, with ourselves. 
 
There are, however, all the vestiges of connective tissue - memories and mementoes, sudden, miraculous leaps of beauty. The book is full of such traces, delicate and fugitive: the poet's grandmother retrieved through her ninety-year-old bookmark of rose petals; the unvoiced suggestion of his mother's voice on an answerphone; the memory of a vanished native chief in a Canadian mountain's shadow...

No Telling

A gripping coming-of-age novel about families and the secrets they hold by the author of Ulverton.

Meticulously observed...a riveting tour de force... Impossible to put down

A wonderful, clear-eyed portrayal of a child's bewildered negotiations with the adult world, shot through with evocative details... No Telling is beautifully written, extremely moving...not merely readable, but gripping

An extraordinarily beautiful and moving novel, the best yet from one of the finest and most underrated writers working in English today

Wonderful...the imaginative tour-de-force Thorpe achieves with No Telling confirms his status as an A-Team novelist

It is beautifully done. Thorpe perfectly captures the inconsequential nature of adolescence...powerful reading

Set in 1968 in the Parisian suburbs, No Telling is narrated by twelve-year-old Gilles as he approaches his Solemn Communion, puberty, and some sense of the chaos around him. His home is deeply dysfunctional: a dithering mother, a hard-drinking, womanising uncle who becomes his stepfather, and an older sister, Carole - an unbalanced revolutionary who hasn't danced her ballet steps since the death of their real father. Gilles is blithely unaware that any of this is out of the ordinary, as he and his friend Christophe try and piece together a world from fragments of rumour and hushed adult conversation. There is a deeper trauma here, however, far more shocking than anything Gilles could have dreamt of - a mystery it will take the events of the novel and eight years to resolve.

Nine Lessons From The Dark

Powerful new poetry collection from the author of Ulverton.

It's hard to imagine greater skill or concision. There are never going to be many poets in any generation who leave you strapped for superlatives; excitingly, Thorpe is one of them

He is a powerful lyric poet, able to evoke place in the manner of Geoffrey Hill

Excellent...Thorpe's poems are finely scored for the voice, but they go beyond the recognisable into the mystical

Erudite, observant, an artist with the language

Verve and intelligence - a beauty of feeling and language

Elegiac, haunting landscape, a refusal to give redundant biographical detail, yet the feeling of genuine experience... masterly

Adam Thorpe's fourth collection continues his engagement with history: the living continuum that connects us with our near and distant past, nourishing and illuminating our present. Here are traces left of presence: Indian scratchings on rock, the nail-marks of destroyed frescoes, spoken fragments of war memories - petroglyphs that function as both memorials and re-awakenings, traceable with the finger of the imagination. And here, too, are images of the stilled, the stopped life: a snowed-up village, the paralysed victim of motor-neurone disease, a soft drink fermented in an old village cafe. 
 
From this rueful equilibrium of mid-life, Thorpe circles his own personal history, allowing regret and anticipation their Janus-like say. These are erudite, generous poems, formally versatile yet rich in startlingly original observation and a natural lyric grace. Performing his unique archaeology on lives lived, Adam Thorpe once again displays the range of his imagination and the depth of his humanity.

Nineteen Twenty-One

A twenties love story and his most commercial novel since Ulverton.

It is the freakishly hot, drought summer of 1921; dust storms in London, parched and cracking earth, autumn tints in July. Holed up in a cottage in the Chilterns, a young writer strives to write the first great novel of the War, impelled by his own suffering. Outward events and inner crises deflect him from his purpose, and love intervenes in the form of two very different women. A visit to the hallucinatory wreckage of post-war Flanders brings strange repercussions in its wake. Everyone is in some way damaged by the terrible years of the war; in what sense can art be made out of such horror? 
 
Adam Thorpe's novel seeks to touch the marrow of this jazz and death-haunted period, which was ironically the most excitingly creative period of the last century. In a language deeply soaked in the time and by means of a beguiling story which gradually haunts its own process, Nineteen Twenty-One vividly recreates the year in which The Waste Land was written, as well as offering a bright mirror to the inner and outer complexities of our own troubled times.

Still

This is a prodigiously rich and allusive book ... We haven't been exposed to such a Rabelaisian gusto of language... if you want to claim that you have lived through this century, that you think you 'understand' its peculiar English seas, its psychological immensities - not least those of self-deception - here is your book.

Complex and playful, joyous and devastating, something as downright relevant as the tip of your nose ... Still is actually a film in fiction. It's as bright and disjointed as The Waste Land.

Enduring, effervescent ... A masterpiece of slipstreaming, sinuous prose.

' outwardly the unfilmable script of a would-be English cineste, one Richard Arthur Thornby currently lecturing in Texas on the cinema. He airs a hypothetical movie of both his own American present and his middle-class English families past. . ' John Fowles

Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe is a long-sighted poet, at home with the ancient and the modern, and with an extraordinary field of vision. [Words from the Wall is a] first-class collection – which repays rereading.

This is a collection in which time is almost entirely fluid; one in which the past and the present frequently coexist in the space of a few lines. Yet it is also one which mines the deep pathos of the passage of time, and those feeling the effects of its inexorable advance.

These remarkable poems are despatches from the edges of experience: from the remote coast of northern Iceland where tree-trunks and dead whales lie beached, to the furthest outposts of the Roman empire in the title poem – ‘From the very limit of the world,/Flavius sends you greetings, my lord.’ The collection is concerned with borders and brinks – the liminal spaces where distinctions blur between outer and inner, known and unknown, between what is familiar and what is other. This is the terrain of the displaced and deracinated but also the shimmering space where all is volatile, mutable, in flux – and it is also, of course, the thin, transparent veil between waking and sleep, between life and death. 
 
Shadowed by mortality, lit by lyrical grace, Words from the Wall includes poems about the killing fields of Agincourt, Flanders, Vietnam and a memorial poem to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan attack where the dead are ‘stations of flame’, and it begins and ends at the boundaries of the Roman territory, at the edge of life: ‘The girls I laughed with once/in the baths’ atrium/are withered and wattle-necked./I love them still…’

Words From the Wall

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Adam Thorpe

Praise for Words From the Wall

Adam Thorpe is a long-sighted poet, at home with the ancient and the modern, and with **an extraordinary field of vision. [Words from the Wall is a] first-class collection – which repays rereading.**

This is a collection in which time is almost entirely fluid; one in which the past and the present frequently coexist in the space of a few lines. Yet it is also one which mines the deep pathos of the passage of tim ...

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