The Love I Do To You
The Love I Do To You
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In this genre-bending debut Mariah Whelan tells the love story of ‘He’ and ‘She’. Once lovers and now... something else, in this collection of sonnets the poems roam across the UK, Europe, Japan and South Korea to explore the oldest of lyric subjects – love, desire, friendship and betrayal. Painful, playful and sensual, these poems explore the bonds that tie lovers and friends together in a collection of startling formal energy and emotional candour.
Mariah Whelan is a poet from Oxford. Her poems appear in The Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2019, Best New British and Irish Poets 2018, The Poetry Book
Society website, The Interpreter’s House and elsewhere. Her writing has been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Melita Hume Prize and has won The AM Heath Prize. Mariah has degrees from Queen’s University Belfast and The University of Oxford, and she currently holds a PhD research scholarship at
The University of Manchester where she is writing a new collection of poems and researching trauma and representation in contemporary Irish fiction.
The admirable achievement of Mariah Whelan’s the love i do to you lies not just in its page-turning fusion of lyrical poetics and dramatic narration, but in the moving power of its steady and intimate candour. Whelan’stransformative sense of scene
– ‘your words like trolleys / half-submerged in the river-clay and weeds’ – is never less than compelling, its psychological alertness quietly propulsive from start to finish. — Jane Draycott