Second Prize Winner of the Laurel Prize 2024
Shortlisted for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Summer 2024
Featuring the poem 'Is that all?' (Highly Commended in The Forward Prizes for Poetry)
Migrating across voices and blurring the divide between bird and human, self and other, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing explores restlessness, love, and ecological and personal grief in a vivid and incantatory sequence of poems.
A lyrical biography of a bird and a fragmented study of a flawed and mutable creature bearing its name, Copley’s second collection takes inspiration from John Gower’s brid falseste of alle and its many literary guises. At the heart of the book are the shifting figures of Lapwing and Peet, two creatures whose overlapping narratives echo the double note of the bird’s cry. In Lapwing, known by countless names, migratory, and slowly disappearing beneath addiction, Copley examines a life in a slow tumble, as we are transported into a world shaped by real and imagined predators. Running alongside Lapwing is the searching voice of Peet, a daughter left to understand her father’s vanishing while trying to make a life in a habitat no longer fit for survival.
Bold, exacting, and deeply personal, Copley’s poems call out from empty nests, drained wetlands, and ploughed fields to create a soundscape of endangerment and wonder. *Lapwing *asks that we consider how, like the bird itself, we must all dissemble to survive.
About the Author :
Hannah Copley is a writer, editor and academic based in South-east England. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, and other publications and anthologies. Hannah’s first collection, Speculum, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine.
Review :
‘Lapwing is the name of the father in these poems, a father who is becoming lost to addiction, one who evades, flies away. A story of a daughter too, caught watching his tumbling flight that is both labored and light. Copley mixes the anthropomorphic with the incantatory to write a book so beautiful that it aches to read it.’ Juliana Spahr
‘Lapwing is quite brilliant - a corkscrewing and glittering helix of art, a story in which love and abandonment are so intertwined as to become one aching song; dry and sidelong, adoring and coruscating, furious with this earth, this life, and deeply adoring, too. I have not read anything quite like it, though fans of Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel will be seized by Hannah Copley’s extraordinary collection. This is a poetry for our time, desperate and beautiful, a storm-surge, perfectly controlled.’ Horatio Clare
‘Reading Lapwing felt like being at the races, with Hannah Copley riding her language like a jockey, and following the movements and journeyings of Peet, the shapeshifting lapwing, was sheer joy. Yes, what I like about these dispatches from the ornithologist following and observing the lapwing as it moves around the world is the riffing of the voice, how it tries to capture a character that refuses to be captured. As the voice gets caught up in Peet’s ecstatic movement, the language becomes (word)play, immersive and compulsive. I felt something grow as I read. This lapwing got me thinking about what it means to be a shapeshifting, dissembling character in the world as it is.’ Jason Allen-Paisant
‘Hannah Copley’s TS Eliot-shortlisted Lapwing memorably riffs on that bird’s monikers in hopping rhythms with notes of Geoffrey Hill and Gerard Manley Hopkins. And swans were a recurring symbol flapping throughout both Armen Davoudian’s debut The Palace of Forty Pillars – with its pleasingly old-fashioned sonnets for his Iranian-Armenian family – and Egg-Shell by Victoria Kennefick, whose Plathian poems about miscarriage sting like a slap to the face.
Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
