Beyond Calling Distance

Esther Morgan’s poems travel great distances across huge landscapes, both real and metaphorical: the big skies and endless horizons of the English Fens, the dust and rock of the Moon, the seas and deserts of dreams. Out of these distances, voices speak, or try to speak, wanting to bridge the gap, to connect, to be heard as well as to listen. Many of her characters are isolated people: the woman taken in adultery, a traveller lost in the Australian outback, a suicide waiting to be discovered, the survivors of war. Balancing doubt with faith in language, these figures in a landscape depict themselves and the strange worlds they inhabit in sensuous detail. Beyond calling distance, at the edge of the audible, Esther Morgan’s delightfully elusive poems await their reader. Beyond Calling Distance, her first collection, won the Aldeburgh Festival First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.