Full Sight of Her

By Patrick Wright

Poetry

Charting a steady encroachment of shadows over a relationship, Wright engages with the most profound subjects – love and loss, madness, grief, illness – and attends to them with a finely-wrought poetic sensibility, producing a soundscape of nervous, almost fractious energy. A play of light and shade runs throughout, with early joys tinged with doubts, moving into omens and prophecies, until fears can no longer be hidden in full daylight. Whether set against a backdrop of cheap and ruinous North-West landscapes, or domestic interiors seen through the lens of expressionist horror, Wright shows us that love and anticipated grief are inseparable, just as the shadow is from the lamp.

Patrick Wright was born in Manchester’s edgelands in 1979. He has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, and his poems have appeared in several magazines, most recently Agenda, The High Window, and Wasafiri. He has been twice included in The Best New British and Irish Poets anthology (2018 and 2019), judged by Maggie Smith and Nick Makoha, respectively. He teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University and lives in Manchester.

Paperback