Product Description

Contains Ether Morgan's first collections of poems full of hints and mysteries. Her book travels great distances across huge landscapes, both real and metaphorical, from the big skies and endless horizons of the English Ferns, the dust and rock of the moon, to the seas and deserts of dreams.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #605171 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

About the Author
Esther Morgan was bornin 1970 in Kidiminster. After reading English at Newham Collage, Cambridge, she worked as a volunteer at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria. She took an MA in creative writting at the University of East Anglia and has since taught on its under-graduate creative writing programmr, editing the UEA new poetry anthology reactions. In 1998, she won an Eric Gregory Award, and taught at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Austrlia. Beyond calling distance is her first book of poems.

Customer Reviews

Great poetry
I came across Esther Morgan in a poetry anthology. It was her poem "Hints for Outback Motoring" that crept under my skin because of the atmosphere and the downwards spiral. There are many other poems in this book that are just as good. In many instances, Esther Morgan does tricky things with her language, and then covers them up with making the poems look straightforward. As a reader, the deeper I delved, the more I discovered. I've read all of the poems at least five times, but I don't think I've finished reading the book. It's one of many poetry books I own that I go back to when I want to read something seemingly familiar in a new way.

Some sublime moments amidst the communication breakdown of ordinary lives
Beyond Calling Distance is loosely themed on what we might call `communication difficulties'. At times - and in occasionally unexpected ways - the difficulties stretch the poetry taut, and bring it to a pitch of intensity all the more remarkable for its being borne of ordinary situations. So for example, a small girl stands among cows `like a priest or sacrifice/in the midst of their steaming henge'. A couple are `guillotined' by newly fitted double glazing that cuts them off first from each other and then from the elements outside. Poems like `Neighbours' and `Last Summer' suggest an undercurrent of unfathomable otherness and regret at the heart of social relationships, while the poignant `Office Angel' and `Miserere' are, in their different ways, laments on the silence of routine and privately-borne suffering. Rich and rewarding.