Gallop: Selected Poems

Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares, and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Gallop begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons. Her acclaimed early poem, "Dreams of Power," gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on "a thrumming lorry."

After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.