Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Eva Salzman is a thoroughly modern, urban poet who writes with equal wit and precision about the natural – and unnatural world. In her sceptical, restless poems, irreverent muses and relentless twins take on sharply contemporary subjects: society, the unreliability of memory and – especially – identity, gender and love, sexual or otherwise.
Born in New York, Eva Salzman moved to Britain in 1985, and four books later has firmly established herself as one of our most irrepressible and necessary poets. Double Crossing includes many new poems as well as selections from collections including The English Earthquake, Bargain with the Watchman and One Two.
‘Eva Salzman is one of the most accomplished poets working in Britain today…her wit, directness and fresh approach to language, whether fierce or lyrical, may be seen as American qualities…From the first moment I encountered her poetry, I knew that Eva Salzman was the real thing, devoted to a demanding but sparking art. She is at the height of her powers at the moment’ – Peter Porter
‘Eva Salzman is no slouch. She has a satirist’s eye and ear alert to the emotional and verbal cliché, the easy lie, and she can be gracefully ruthless. She can shift register from the formal and elegiac to an astringent New York sarcasm. She can shuffle the vocabularies of love and landscape, turn the grotesque poignant, the funny terrifying – a facility rare on either side of the Atlantic’ – Michael Donaghy
‘A major talent…Plenty of bite…the hormones are almost good enough to smell’ – Poetry Review
Eva Salzman's Brooklyn Bridge
Eva Salzman reads her poem 'Brooklyn Bridge' from Double Crossing. This YouTube video was produced by Seren Books to promote its anthology Women's Work, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, which includes this poem.
