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Hurricane Watch

New and Collected Poems

Olive Senior

Cover of Hurricane Watch by Olive Senior
10% off all versions
Categories: 20th Century, 21st Century, BAME, Canadian, Caribbean, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (456 pages)
(Pub. Jan 2022)
9781800172166
£25.00 £22.50
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jan 2022)
9781800172173
£20.00 £18.00
Digital access available through Exact Editions
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award 2023 by the League of Canadian Poets

    Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems
    brings together Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior's first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. Recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 from the Institute of Jamaica, Senior has long been recognised as a skilful and evocative storyteller but what this book shows is the consistency and range of her achievement.

    Senior's poems are delicate, formally playful and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems' brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics and culture in original, surprising and sensuous ways.
    Olive Senior is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica 2021–24. She is the award-winning author of twenty books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children's literature and other published work. Her many awards include Canada's Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers ... read more
    Awards won by Olive Senior Short-listed, 2023 The Raymond Souster Award by the League of Canadian Poets
    (Hurricane Watch)
    'Senior is an inventive and at her best deeply imaginative writer. Her approaches are eclectic... Senior's gift for narrative is a major strength. Often, there's more to a well-told, apparently ingenuous story than meets the eye.'
    Dilys Wood, ARTEMISpoetry
    'The scale and scope of Senior's subject matter is remarkable.'

    Zakia Carpenter-Hall, The Poetry Review

    'Senior [...] has been producing poetry of beauty and historical resonance for nearly four decades. Hurricane Watch shows her continually remaking the story of cultural exile and belonging.'

    Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 

    'I cannot think of a better way to read your way into 2022.'

    Kate Kellaway, The Observer

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