The Occupant

‘I watch you sweat, I watch you sleep. Some far and submarine light keeps you swimming. In the blueberry bloom lungs loosen, the pulse is in retreat, speech is unlearned and falls in spools of oil-shine tape along the mineshaft floor.’ Following the success of her T. S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over and award-winning translation of the medieval Pearl, Jane Draycott returns with her fourth collection of poems, The Occupant. With a rhythmic subtlety and metrical poise that have become hallmarks of her verse, Draycott hints at the existence of a world of dreamlike clarity underneath our own. In the National Gallery a gardener cuts away the flower from a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; in an abandoned sanatorium a grand piano dreams of the voices and music of days past, ‘rose-spotted paintwork peeling softly, half-moon fanlights rising, sinking’. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem, ‘The Occupant’, draws on scenes proposed but left unwritten in Martinus Nijhoff’s Awater. In the stifling summer air, Draycott’s occupant trawls the streets of an unnamed city whose ‘dead lanes keep their silence’, where ‘the frail expire and pale dogs whimper’, as its police post notices: ‘Missing: Have you seen this wind?’

About the Author :
Jane Draycott’s previous collections from Carcanet include The Kingdom (2022), The Occupant (Poetry Book Society Recommendation), Over (T S Eliot Prize shortlist), Prince Rupert’s Drop (Forward Prize shortlist) and her 2011 prize-winning translation of the the medieval dream-elegy Pearl.Other collections, from Two Rivers Press, include Storms Under the Skin: Selected Poems of Henri Michaux, 1927-1954 (a PBS Recommended Translation), and two collections with artist Peter Hay: Christina the Astonishing, co-authored with Lesley Saunders, and Tideway, both reissued in 2022 in the TRP Illustrated Classics series. A recipient of the Keats Shelley Prize for Poetry, Draycott has been NL Letterenfonds Writer in Residence in Amsterdam and was winner of the 2014 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. In 2023 she was the recipient of a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award. A Next Generation Poet (2004), she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches on Oxford University's MSt in Creative Writing. Visit Jane Draycott's website.

Review :
'Her searching curiosity and wonderful assurance make her an impeccable and central poetic intelligence.' Penelope Shuttle, Manhattan Review 'Draycott uses the language of dreams to make the quotidian illusionary, like a vapour captured in lexicon. Sleeplessness haunts the collection... Homeliness is pushed, just, over to Freud's unhomely conclusions. The dream world, enticing and enlightening as he might have it to be, proves no more accommodating than our own.' Lucy Cheseldine, STAND