Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Choice Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry's power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, Fury is David Morley's most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry's capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world - its power to be an outreached hand, like the 'trembling hands' of the magician in 'The Thrown Voice' or the 'living hand' of the poets celebrated in 'Translations of a Stammerer'.
About the Author :
David Morley is an ecologist and naturalist by background. He studied Zoology at the University of Bristol and pursued research on acid rain. His awards for poetry include the Ted Hughes Award and a Cholmondeley Award. His last poetry collection FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
Photo Credit: Claire McNamee
Review :
'A linguistic playground full of marvels'
D.A. Prince, Under the Radar
'In this daring new collection, Morley holds a mirror up to the myriad of irresponsible ways that we as humans influence the natural world and how we treat one another... Threaded with Romanes - as Morley's poems often are - this is a celebration of the Roma tongue as well as the people and places gone by... To read Fury is to tread a pilgrimage along the oldest putkka. To know these paths is to be compelled to walk them again, to feel the trembling pride for our ethnicity and to sing once more of home.'
Jo Clement, Travellers Times
'The poems of FURY are acts of radical connection across cultures and language... FURY comes with a hard political edge too, in elegies for cultural loss: "All the nameless people named here. / The story ends with who we were."'
Aingeal Clare, The Guardian
'In FURY, Morley's concerns combine as never before into a keening, politicised call to pay attention to the missing, the lost, and the deliberately elided [...] Morley's trademark fusion of Romani and English "Angloromani" forges afresh his lyric gifts'
Sinead Morrissey, PBS Autumn Bulletin
'Morley's mastery of poetics comes into full effect as he introduces more and more Romany words in his poems... Morley connects us simultaneously to the past and the present, to our world and the natural world. An ecologist and naturalist, David Morley's attention to the natural world is particular and more acute than most... David Morley's Fury is an exhibition of poetic prowess and skilful storytelling that extends his interests in the legacy of Gypsy people from his previous collections. Readers can expect to be treated to a force of nature in poetics, linguistic dexterity and storytelling.'
H.M. Hussain, DURA Dundee
'...Poems which all possess such showmanship and sonic agility... Morley's poetics of mimicry and ventriloquism echo the collection's subjects of displaced peoples and species, illustrating the virtuosity of voice, in a mutually reinforcing loop.'
The Poetry Review
'David Morley's FURY is published by Carcanet. Sonnets meet pantoums in this festival of loves and voices, the air is full of birds, fury meets gentleness, and every poem is deeply interested in what language makes of us... FURY controls its furies with ever inventive craftsmanship.'
Alexandra Harris, Chair of Judges, The Forward Prize
'A rich and musical collection with a sharp political bite... there's something magical about reading the poems first for the sheer verbal play of the language, the sparking, luminous sounds it makes in the mouth and paints on the mind...FURY has an enormous range, and handles its politics with sensitivity and power'
Senn Hewitt, The Irish Times
