Jane Draycott
Jane Draycott’s most recent collection Over (Carcanet/OxfordPoets) was shortlisted for the 2009 T S Eliot Prize. Previous
collections include Prince Rupert's Drop and The Night Tree. Nominated three times for a Forward Prize,
she is a PBS 'Next Generation' poet. Her translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl is forthcoming in 2011.
"Jane Draycott's quiet, meticulous poems inhabit the vague, evanescent world between waking and sleeping. ” Times Literary Supplement
Prospect
Some believe that new developments will allow us to rise above
our nature and live for hundreds of years
Peter Healey, Tomorrow's People University of Oxford 2010
Anyone who wanted to could leave, could gather
shivering on the south side of the river,
labelled and provided for with socks and sweaters
and a little cash. We walked across the water
in our thousands and left behind for ever
all that was great: the monuments and sewers,
cathedrals, theatres, mothers, lovers, brothers
as the flames licked at the city's raging heart.
Faced with the prospect of living forever,
we headed for the country lanes together,
imagining the parties de campagne among the clover
and the stories each would tell the others
on the way. We had left behind for ever
all that we had loved. It was a start.
© Jane Draycott