'I should make clear from the outset that it's a collection I like very much... This is a collection that speaks to the reader's doubts, uncertainties, fears, death-thoughts; there is no single reading and that, for me, makes it stronger... It anticipates the future, as art should.'
London Grip

'These poems, especially when read in order in the collection as a whole, are deeply unsettling; yet there is love in them, and hope. There is also great tenderness and an awareness of a beauty that can still be valued in the fragility of the moment and the world.'
Kathleen Bell, The High Window

'Draycott is rightly regarded as a poet of sensitivity and lyrical control. But these are not airy poems. Their mysteries are well served by the muscularity of her descriptions. Even the briefest poems here offer richly textured, shimmering language.'
Maya Popa, TLS

'These are approachable poems, expressed in lucid language, and studded with clear images. They are finely wrought, knitting form and sound patterns beautifully, but holding these formal properties lightly... The Kingdom is moving, intriguing. It's a place I know I will keep returning too, to lose an hour our two.'
Emma Simon, The Friday Poem

Jane Draycott’s previous collections from Carcanet include The Kingdom (2022), The Occupant (Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Over (T S Eliot Prize shortlist), Prince Rupert’s Drop (Forward Prize shortlist) and her 2011 prize-winning translation of the the medieval dream-elegy Pearl.Other collections, from Two Rivers Press, include Storms Under the Skin: Selected Poems of Henri Michaux, 1927-1954 (a PBS Recommended Translation), and two collections with artist Peter Hay: Christina the Astonishing, co-authored with Lesley Saunders, and Tideway, both reissued in 2022 in the TRP Illustrated Classics series. A recipient of the Keats Shelley Prize for Poetry, Draycott has been NL Letterenfonds Writer in Residence in Amsterdam and was winner of the 2014 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. In 2023 she was the recipient of a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award. A Next Generation Poet (2004), she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches on Oxford University's MSt in Creative Writing. Visit Jane Draycott's website.