Olivia McCannon’s first collection explores life on the edge of possibility: in one moment the familiar is blown open, we plunge into the unknown. A chance meeting seals a lifetime; a girl leaps from a window, away from safety – ‘she wanted to see what can happen’. From families improvising a living space in Cairo’s City of the Dead, to a veteran of the Normandy landings coming home to the peaceful reparation of ‘glueing, welding, soldering’, life is luminous, and resolutely seized. The closing sequence follows the last months of the poet’s mother’s life. A journey into grief and loss, it pays tribute to the courage of refusing false comfort, the strength that in the end enables us to live ‘between the lines / of tombs’.

Liverpool Echo
City of the Dead
Dust
Mirror
Map
Cohabitation
Paper Tiger
Jubilee Portraits
No. 3
Probability
Argyle Street, 1983
Barometer
Unborn
Light-Stone
The Offer
Ironing
Map of the Moor
Hope Street, 1966
Retirement
Month of Herons
Exactly My Own Length
Book of Hours
Laughter
Sick World
At the Door
Honouring the Dead
You Said This
The Weight of Life
The Lovelace Place
No More Fields
Stewed Fruit
A Request to the Cranes
Landing Light
Vigil
What To Do With a Baby
Fragile Domain
Conversation
Nothing I Can Do
All Souls’ Day
Memorial
Last and First