Tiffany Atkinson

Winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year)

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

So Many Moving Parts, Tiffany Atkinson’s third collection, is an eccentric 21st-century meditation on the awkwardness of body and spirit and their unexpected, often unwanted intrusions into the business of everyday life. Lyrical and experimental by turns, these poems push familiar events - commuting, telephones, babysitting, foreign travel - to open out toward unanswerable questions and elemental connections with an unstable physical world. A cast of real people observed over a year reveal momentary dramas as in a series of sketches, and the poet turns an ironic, unflinching eye on her own generation’s transition from youth to middle age.

Bold, wishful, ambivalent, sometimes even grudgingly affectionate, the collection is a spiky celebration of the almost invisible revelations that insist when you only look closely enough.

'A fresh, moving and brilliantly inventive book... some of the most striking, and touching, moments in the book come from its dry sense of humour... Atkinson sees the absurdity in everyday scenarios, but also their poetic potential.' – Sarah Howe, Poetry Wales

'The unexpected imagery always packs a punch... Visceral, and at times unsettling, this darkly iridescent verse is hardly comfort poetry – but that's the point.' – Juanita Coulson, The Lady

'I mouthed a silent "wow" at much of her imagery, including "sexuality is mostly a crystal / like the grit of sugar at the elbow / on a wipe-dry table" and "like mirrors in a changing room / that whack you back and forth between yourself".' – Katrina Naomi, Mslexia

'A startling book, full of outstanding poems to be returned to again and again... Atkinson's technique can take poetry, incredibly successfully, to places it is difficult to remember it having been before.' – Jonathan Edwards, New Welsh Review

'This is poetry of acute aliveness... These new poems have the dynamic quality of robust, heightened speech... With these revelatory, refreshing poems, Atkinson conveys a many-faceted self, and frees up possibilities for the voice in poetry.' – Deryn Rees-Jones & Moniza Alvi, Poetry Book Society Bulletin