Books by Rachael Boast

Void Studies, Rachel Boast's extraordinary new collection, realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never written. Etudes neantes was to consist of poems written as musical etudes; these would not convey any direct message - but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject. This 'impossible project' has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing way, and in doing so she has increased the expressive possibilities of poetry itself. These tone poems are indeed works of pure music - but despite their esoteric nature are by no means 'difficult' in the usual sense: instead they conjure the recognizable states, emotions, moods, ambiances and strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a kind of lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book - one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer the most profound questions poetry can frame.

Rachael Boast's first collection, Sidereal, was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second, Pilgrim's Flower, richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent - but where Sidereal's gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens, Boast's focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings life's intoxicants - love, nature, literature, friendship, and other forms and methods of transcendence - and sees Boast's pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim's Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things - the slippage between what we think we know, and what is actually there - and in doing so brings the language of rite, observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.

Rachael Boast's first collection is dominated by astral influence and divine chance, by unseen or remote causes; but despite its celestial title, Sidereal is full of terrestrial concerns, the traffic and chaos of the human and natural worlds. Ultimately, however, it is the work of a poet who believes that we must also turn our gaze skywards to make sense of who we are, and these poems pursue their elliptical but inevitable orbits through a world where the earthly and transcendent are thoroughly interfused. Above all, Sidereal impresses through Boast's lyric faith, which through even the worst pain and despair can still offer its clarities and revelations, and announces an important new voice in British poetry. Sidereal is winner of the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry 2012.