Alarum - Paperback

by Wayne Holloway-Smith (Author)

The mischievous and often dark world of Wayne Holloway-Smith's first collection Alarum exists in the space between the peculiar thought and its dismissal. It is a place in which commonsense is unfixed, where the imagination disrupts notions of stability. 'A single crow falling from the mind' of the poet is something awkward left at our feet, and the 'air itself' is the voice of skewered unease. The complexities of life are jolted awake throughout this fearlessly inventive debut, as loss arrives played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a movie, the risk of romance is understood as the filling in a sandwich, and anxieties are found hunkered in bushes, blooming behind the wallpaper, and in the bursting of balloons.

Author Biography

Wayne Holloway-Smith was born in Wiltshire and lives in London. His first book-length collection, Alarum (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) was a Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice for Winter 2017, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize 2017 and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2018, and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for a distinctive first book of poetry. The final poem in the collection, 'Short', won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize 2016. His book of poetry, I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE WENDING, was published by Test Centre Publications in 2018. He won the National Poetry Competition 2018 for 'the posh mums are boxing in the square' from his second book-length book of poetry, Love Minus Love (Bloodaxe Books, 2020). Love Minus Love was also a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020 and the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections 2021. His pamphlet length poem Lobsters was published by Pakina Press in 2022. In October 2022 he was appointed Editor of The Poetry Review, the quarterly magazine of The Poetry Society.