In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. ‘Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend’, he writes in ‘After a Song by Gustav Mahler’. In The Magic of What’s There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy.

'Exuberant, linguistically experimental poems... his work has affinities with Hughes's attention to both the surfaces and depths of the natural world.'
Jeff Gundy, Poetry Salzburg Review

'Morley is a master of the integrity of wholes and parts. A fabulous collection of poems...'
Dundee University Review of the Arts

'David Morley can work in more than one mode... no subject is off limits here'
Harry Cochrane, TLS

David Morley is an ecologist and naturalist by background. He studied Zoology at the University of Bristol and pursued research on acid rain. His awards for poetry include the Ted Hughes Award and a Cholmondeley Award. His last poetry collection FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. Photo Credit: Claire McNamee