Collected Poems 1973-2020

I’m very grateful to Shearsman Books, for publishing my Collected Poems, which was launched at Swedenborg Hall, www.swedenborg.org.uk, on May 10th 2022. The first volume, 1973 to 2004, is an overview of poetic development, experiments with modern and postmodern poetry and prose, projects and collaborations, sometimes associated with the new British poetry. Feminism and political commitment are sharply defined, alongside a growing concern for ecology. It includes The Sex of Art, Hula Hoop, Linocut and Somerset Letters, as well as collaborations, with artist Irma Irsara, on women’s clothing, Automatic Cross Stitch, and with poet Elizabeth James, Neither the One nor the Other. It supersedes and expands my selected poems, Paravane (2004) and Myne (2006). The second volume, 2004 to 2020, brings together major projects and publications. Feminism and political commitment are still evident, but ecology and ecopoetics are foregrounded. It includes Stone Settings and Longstones which explores Neolithic stones on Exmoor, in collaboration with visual poet Tilla Brading; the playful An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt; as well Halse for Hazel, which received an Arts Council award; and the Ada Lovelace project, Ada Unseen. There is also a new sequence, Channels, on shorelines and parallel coasts. Available from www.shearsman.com. Cover images are by Jun Shirasu and Irma Irsara.

Welcome to this comprehensive, collected poems from one of our most impressive contemporary poets. Here we can trace how, from her earliest poems, with their intense and tense engagement with her modernist forbears, Frances Presley has maintained an uncompromising integrity and invention. Her use of the page as a space of experimentation and of language as a multiple-stranded thread of living letters and sounds is dazzling, and these volumes allow us to see the shifts in this practice over decades. Each collection has built on the last, yet remained open to the world as she sees it at the moment of writing, as she greets it with an eye and voice both tender and sardonic. We see this in the wit with which she incorporates diverse found materials into her work and in her engagement with her fellow poets and artists through allusion, conversation and collaboration. In these carefully woven webs, her sense of place and the politics of landscape and her astute feminism remain constant.
Harriet Tarlo

As these volumes attest, Frances Presley’s is the poetry of the artisan, authentic in the sharpest sense of the word: rare, inventive, its original beauties edged and tempered by the traditional skills in which they germinated. Nomadic in theme, sinewy of thought, filigree in habit, this oeuvre rummages with discriminating care among the cultural-linguistic currents and debris complicating the experiencing of place, distant or proximal, prehistoric or contemporary, empty or inhabited.
Alice Entwhistle

Presley combines deliberate poetry and environmental engagement to compel us to think and act. She sews together language, time, and space; and shows us that the creative act itself inspires a vivid ecopoetics of the imagination.
Chad Weidner