Another Country
New & Selected Poems
Jane Griffiths writes mysteriously resonant poems about home, exile and shifting frontiers in classically precise language. "Another Country" presents a selection from her first two collections, "A Grip on Thin Air" and "Icarus on Earth", as well as a whole collection of new work. Where the earlier books are shot through with a migrant's sense of estrangement, her new poems explore what it might mean to settle in a place. The central sequence 'Eclogue Over Merlin Street' highlights this changing perspective through a dialogue between two voices of an immigrant in London, one embracing her new life but the other still haunted by displacement. Many other poems echo this tension, caught between love of a place and the fear of losing it. Jane Griffiths celebrates the landscapes she lives in by observing and recording them, yet with a strong awareness that these places exist in and of themselves, regardless of her observation. Hers are poems that delight in being in the world, despite the threat of loss.
Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, and brought up in Holland and Devon. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem 'The House' won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a book-binder in London and Norfolk. Returning to Oxford, she completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. After teaching English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then at the universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, she now teaches at Wadham College, Oxford, and is literary editor of the Oxford Magazine. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her book Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which included a new collection, Eclogue Over Merlin Street (2008), together with large selections from her previous two Bloodaxe collections, A Grip on Thin Air (2000) and Icarus on Earth (2005), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her later collections from Bloodaxe are Terrestrial Variations (2012), Silent in Finisterre (2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Little Silver (2022).
