Acanthus

Book Launch.

Acanthus

By Claire Potter

Launch Price £12 RRP £14

A new collection, ten years in the making, by one of Australia’s richest lyrical poets.

Acanthus offers poems that dwell in the landscapes of edges, of northern and southern hemispheres, of myth and fantasy – voyage and desire – as they oscillate between observation and finding one’s home. At the heart of Potter’s poetry is a keen awareness of the power of transformation, which draws the celestial and the physical closer to hand. These poems hold an ear to those wandering figures who, like Homer and Icarus, search the peripheries for clues. Surreal gardens, oblique geometries, rooms of clouds, witches, and childhood remembrances, lie not outside the natural world but directly within it, mixing poetry and quotation – dream and prose. Each poem lies at an angle to the next, sitting as if within the net of a wider page, seeking to embody the radical arc of reading, reverie, and falling right through literary spaces.

Claire Potter is the author of three poetry collections and numerous essays and translations. Her poetry has been published in Poetry Chicago, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Best Australian Poems, New Statesman, and Poetry Ireland Review and translated into Chinese and French. She studied at the University of Western Australia, and the University of NSW, and has a Masters in Psychoanalysis from Université Paris VII and in Psychoanalytic Infant Studies from the Tavistock Institute. She teaches at the Architectural Association London where she also runs the AAWriting Centre.

Join us for a drinks reception to celebrate Claire Potter’s new publication introduced by the Architectural Association’s Head of Learning Mark Morris