A Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Recommendation The Long Beds explores the cell-like containment of the small hours when the body has no estate but its bed, while – waking or dreaming – the mind sets out on its travels, often in the realms of an old life, cherished items or relinquished connections. Central to the poems’ imagery is the presence of a bedstead that has survived a bombing raid, protecting only what was bundled underneath it. In painterly language Kate Miller also trains her eye and ear outwards on grand, impersonal scenes: London at dawn, riverbanks and docks, the corridors of a great hospital: to uncover fogged experience and restore colour to memory. Her poems prod us awake at first light and release us into the morning.
About the author
Kate Miller is an award-winning poet, recipient of the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Prize in 2008. Her book The Observances (2015) was shortlisted for the Costa and Michael Murphy Prizes and won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for First Collection. Trained in Art History and Fine Art, her teaching career was enlivened by creative collaborations, performances and site-specific installations. Events she devised for the Hayward Gallery focussed on light and colour on the Thames which later led to the 2016 commission to celebrate Waterloo Bridge, included here. As a writer, and in her doctoral research, she examines perceptions of the shoreline of rivers and beaches, of what is cast up and can be reclaimed, bringing history and memory to a sense of place. She lives in South London and on the Isle of Oxney with her family.
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