Stitching the Dark

Carole Satyamurti's poetry explores love, attachment and the fragility of personal survival, charting the tension between connected and separate lives. With an unflinching eye, she takes on complex and often painful subject-matter - cancer for instance or raising a disabled child. Many of her poems hinge on a turning-point or a place where one life touches another, bearing witness to the way we imagine - or fail to imagine - the otherness of others. Stitching the Dark draws on four previous books and includes a whole new collection, her strongest and most formally adventurous. In these new poems, there is a deeper engagement with the universal predicament of how to live in the face of mortality - of what it means to exist, and to cease existing. The title suggests that the act of writing - the search for the right words - is an attempt to repair, illuminate, and give form to what is unknown, fearful, perplexing. But the collection is by no means solemn. There is also wit and celebration, dark humour and a fine sense of the absurd, as well as poems challenging our responses to events that do not affect us directly. 'Graceful yet tough writing, authentic and finely tuned' - elizabeth Bartlett 'Her unobtrusive approach is deceptive - these poems have unexpected stings in their tails' - penelope shuttle. 'Tensions we can all recognise...both gripping to read and positive in spirit...Her particular gift is for catching the poignant detail of inescapable human dilemmas and tensions' - alan brownjohn