Amanda Dalton Readings
'Dark, funny, wise, terrifying. She is searingly matter-of-fact about the most painful recesses of the human heart… She dances round every corner with a grace that many more seasoned writers would die for.’ – Jo Shapcott
Amanda Dalton's third full-length collection Fantastic Voyage was published by Bloodaxe Books in May 2024. Scroll down to watch a video of Bloodaxe's joint online reading and discussion event of 21 May 2024.
By turns wryly humorous, tender and heartbroken, Fantastic Voyage takes us on journeys into our hidden and ghostly selves, our insides and our ‘other’, exploring the myriad ways in which the human body gives voice to unspeakable truths. These poems put us in and alongside bodies that are ill, out of control and inhabited - our dark innards as harbingers of secrets and fears, the gut as fortune-teller and home to ghosts. The book's central long poem, Notes on Water – a meditation on water – charts a deeply personal voyage through grief and loss. Two contrasting voices attempt to navigate a devastated world as both a corporeal and visceral experience, one grounded, the other hallucinatory. In other dreamlike experiences, the poems glimpse absent bodies as apparitions, doppelgängers and hauntings, and our visible selves as beings we cannot always recognise. Readers can listen to the original BBC Radio 3 version of Notes on Water using a QR code printed in the book.
Amanda Dalton's first book-length collection, How to Disappear (Bloodaxe Books 1999), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and she was chosen as a Next Generation Poet in 2004. Her second collection, Stray, was published by Bloodaxe in 2012. In 2021 Arc published her experimental chapbook, 30 Poems in 30 Days and in 2022 Smith|Doorstop published a pamphlet of two long poems, Notes on Water. A version of Notes on Water was re-created for two voices and soundscape for BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears, narrated by Amanda Dalton and Colette Bryce.
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An in-depth review of Fantastic Voyage can be read online at the Yorkshire Times. Steve Whitaker reviewed Amanda Dalton's collection alongside Carrie Etter's Grief's Alphabet. He writes: 'the broad, multi-angled and complex landscape of loss is witheringly prosecuted by Etter and Dalton'.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Sunday 13 October, 8pm
Bloodaxe showcase event
Ilkley Literature Festival
Amanda will be reading alongside fellow Bloodaxe poets Sarah Holland-Batt and Matt Howard.
More details and booking here. Tickets £12 (£9 concessions).
PAST EVENTS
Tuesday 21 May 2024, 7pm BST
Bloodaxe online launch reading by Amanda Dalton, Imtiaz Dharker and Katie Donovan
Amanda Dalton, Imtiaz Dharker and Katie Donovan launched their new collections online with Bloodaxe on 21 May 2024, joining from their homes in London, Hebden Bridge and Dublin.
The poets read from their new books Fantastic Voyage, Shadow Reader and May Swim, and discussed them with each other and with the host, editor Neil Astley. Excellent readings by all three poets, followed by a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion about writing in response to loss, and also about how their work in other areas – art, drama and therapy – feeds into their poetry. Amanda read first in each set.
[23 May 2024]
