Confer
Confer is a book between two cities - London and Paris - with detours via rural and small-town England, drunkenness and death camps in Bavaria, the American absurd and the lost libraries of the Roman Empire. It contains love and lust poems, variations on Baudelaire and conversations with Nietzsche and Auden. This impressive debut collection by a young poet already well-known for his innovative, highly musical poetry draws its energy from an interplay between melody and intellect. Ahren Warner's poems seek to amplify the effect of our common experiences and to attenuate the everyday within a matrix of philosophy and art, language and its intervals. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Ahren Warner was born in 1986. His first collection, Confer (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2013. He was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2010 and an Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2012. His second collection, Pretty (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was another Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His third collection, Hello. Your promise has been extracted (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is Poetry Editor of Poetry London and Vice Chancellor's Research Fellow at Loughborough University, and currently lives in London and Paris.
