Naranjas

Like all his work, the poems here are imprinted with landscapes, relationships and memories, but they also show how encounters with paintings, with reading and with history, through imaginative sympathy, can be transformed into personal lived experiences. The publication of Naranjas, marking Pow’s seventieth year, shows him still writing poems “alive to the sounds, smells, noises and ironies of life,” as Jim Burns commented of Red Letter Day (1996) in Ambit. But there is an urgency underlying the poems in this present work, as they seek better to understand how people live “in the green bone-yards of our world”.

Tom Pow’s Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Poetry Book of the Year in 2009, the same year In The Becoming – New and Selected Poems was published. In Another World – Among Europe’s Dying Villages was published in 2012. Recolectores de Nueces (The Walnut Gatherers), a bi-lingual selection of poems, translated by Jorge Fondebrider, was published in 2015.

He edited Barefoot – The Collected Poems of Alastair Reid for Galileo Publishing (2018). He has held several residences and his work has been recorded for The Poetry Archive. In 2019, he was Creative Director of A Year of Conversation.