Oak

Oaks are some of our oldest companions, and have been rooted in human imagination and language for millennia. Their great, slow lives have always demanded our careful consideration (indeed Virginia Woolf’s Orlando took 300 years over their own quercian epic). Katharine Towers’ new sequence of poems accompanies the oak from acorn to grave, and into its afterlife; playful, lyric and lucid, Oak is also shot through with an ecocritical awareness that renders it utterly contemporary. Towers’ precise eye and gift for sharp comparison allows us to enter into the life of the tree, and the birds and insects and plants it hosts; it shows how its seven ages echo and rhyme with our own, and how, by implication, we may also be tied to the same cycle of death and renewal. Oak wins its power through an extraordinary act of imaginative voicing, and accomplishes the most important work of the nature poem: to take the reader out of themselves, and into the larger world they also inhabit.

Inventive, capacious and full of the surprises witnessed only by the truly observant, Oak is an arboreous atlas for our age, In Oak, the poet's life is equal to the tree's, and the two meet in delicate reflection on the page. Like the acorn it begins with, this poem is a plucky epic, Oak is the most beautiful thing. A long poem at once fragmentary and whole, with all the sophistication of folklore and all the play of true poetry. Katherine Towers is one of the most original and gifted poets now writing. Her brilliant book is something no other could do, “an outburst of words” so old and English and fresh.

Katharine Towers was born in London and now lives in Derbyshire with her family. She has published two poetry collections, both with Picador. The Floating Man won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. A poem from the collection ‘The Way We Go’ appeared as a Poem on the Underground and was also set to music by the composer Laura Stevens. Her second collection The Remedies was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.Katharine’s poems have been broadcast on Radio 3 and Radio 4 and have appeared in several anthologies, as well as in The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London. From 2016 – 2018 Katharine was Poet in Residence at the Cloud Appreciation Society.