Pavilion Poetry is a new poetry series from Liverpool University Press and seeks to publish the very best in contemporary poetry to challenge and delight.  The series was launched in 2015 with new collections by three exciting voices.

Small Hands by Mona Arshi

Mona Arshi’s debut collection, Small Hands, introduces a brilliant and compelling new voice.  At the centre of the book is the slow detonation of grief after her brother’s death but her work focuses on the whole variety of human experience – pleasure, hardship, tradition – energised by language that is in turn both tender and risky. Often startling as well as lyrical, Arshi’s poems resist fixity; there is a gentle poignancy at work here that haunts many of the poems. This is humane poetry. Arshi’s is a daring, moving and original voice.

And She Was: A Verse Novel by Sarah Corbett

A soul’s journey through the night, a missing woman: time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms and voices to make one story of love and loss. In And She Was, Corbett combines the fictional spell-making of Haruki Murakami with the filmic neo-noir of Atom Egoyan (Exotica) and David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), to push the boundaries of poetic genre, asking us to renegotiate the way in which we encounter and reconfigure ourselves through trauma, in desire, or as we seek to reassemble ourselves and our past. And She Was demands our attention; its startling and dazzling writing asks us to be carried away as we read, but returns us by its end to a place both resolved and transformed.

Blood Child by Eleanor Rees

In her third full-length collection Blood Child, Eleanor Rees hones and extends her startling use of language and imagery to enact the many aspects of change – fleeting, elusive or moored – in a negotiation of the material world as she roams through the landscapes of self and city. The idea of generation is explored in all its possibilities, the ‘child’ and the ‘girl’ are recurrent motifs, immanent and on the threshold of a magical or imaginative transformation. Landscapes are crossed, swum, burrowed under or flown above; skins and edges are sheared or lost, new coverings found and remade. Rees’s poems ask how new routes can be forged across shifting terrain and she offers the emergent space of the imagination as the only answer.

Cost: free