Overview

Good Ground by Olly Todd is an expansive and sharply observed collection that blends memoir, cultural commentary, and lyric digression with a skater's eye for momentum and terrain. Spanning London and Los Angeles, Cumbria and San Francisco, the poems range across landscapes both urban and domestic, attentive to the textures of language, architecture, and memory. Todd's lines are deft and searching, often elliptical yet richly referential, moving fluidly between anecdote, elegy, and philosophical aside. This is a work of subtle composition and wide imaginative scope, animated by restlessness, warmth, and formal intelligence.

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9781917617642

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Reviews

In this very accomplished second collection, we are in the hands of a writer who knows just how to make a poem sound. Here, the felicities, strange temperaments and small tragedies of life seek to evade the book's attempts to contain them, and still we find ourselves newly, beautifully, on solid ground. - Sam Buchan-Watts Good Ground is above all a book of stock-taking in midlife. Prefaced by the mysterious phrase 'methera, pip, sethera' (from an ancient numerical system used by Cumbrian shepherds), Todd embarks on a reckoning with - or an accounting of - past and present, here and there, us and them, in search of an accommodation. That he is so successful in doing so is down to his formal, tonal and thematic range and his outrageous sense of adventure. From the razor-sharp sonnets of 'The Buried Stone' and 'Travel Cot, Valldemossa' via the wry humour of 'Slurpee Cup' to the wistful brilliance of 'Objective Permanence' ('What restoration, what tamped grammar / Is indexed here? What hospitality, what tower / Of paint, what cascading wing, / What westgoing late summer light.') Todd journeys between America and England, between the noughties and the present, between singledom and fatherhood in his clear-eyed, complicated reckoning with the scope of a life. - Toby Martinez de las Rivas

Author Information

Olly Todd was born in West Cumbria and lives in East Sussex. His poems have appeared in The Rialto, Ambit, Prototype, and The Forward Book of Poetry, as well as Radio 3's The Verb. He is the author of Odeum Spotlights (Rough Trade Books) and Out for Air (Penned in the Margins), which was nominated for the Rathbone Folio Prize.

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