Please join Carcanet to launch three new titles: Fur Coats in Tahiti by Jeremy Over, Tripping Over Clouds by Lucy Burnett (published with Northern House), and City of Departures by Helen Tookey.

We’ll celebrate with readings, followed by a discussion chaired by Carcanet founder, Michael Schmidt; each of the books will be available to purchase on the night. Please let us know you can make it by reserving a free Eventbrite ticket here.

City of Departures is Helen Tookey’s second Carcanet collection, following her 2014 Missel-Child, an ‘exceptional volume … from a powerful and intelligent imagination’ (Jeffrey Wainwright).

City of Departures is a collection of uncanny spaces and fleeting encounters, an urban patchwork of glimpsed moments and chance affiliations. Through them, Tookey explores the ways in which we create meaning and connection in these kinds of spaces, and how the nature of those connections—often temporary and provisional—affects who we are, and who we are becoming.

Tookey’s work has a new formal inventiveness and experimental temperament. The collection mixes prose and verse, and a multitude of voices and structures mingle on its pages. The poems connect through repeated images, themes and tones, which echo and re-echo. Their loci are neglected houses and gardens, canals, wrecked boats… liminal worlds where absence has a presence of its own, fertile ground for ghosts, fantasies, memories, and dreams.

Fur Coats in Tahiti by Jeremy Over is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group, and the New York school.

Jeremy Over mixes collage, doodles, erasures, findings, and mistranslations to create unlikely meetings between, amongst others, the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou and G.K. Chesterton, the Zen Buddhist D.T. Suzuki and Tommy Cooper, Steve Reich and Dan Maskell.

There are scissor snips and slips of the tongue and eye in a sequence of word and image compositions derived from an Edwardian illustrated dictionary.

Elsewhere there are childlike, and plain childish, oral and aural pleasures to be had with bananas, cherries and Slobodan Živojinović; tahini and Petroc Trelawny. The book begins with ‘O’, an open-mouthed astonishment at nativity, and ends, not with Z but, in the hope of further connection, with the twenty seventh letter of the alphabet: ‘&’.

Lucy Burnett’s Tripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound’s maxim to ‘go in fear of abstractions’.

Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from. Both philosophical and fresh, the poetry trips off and back onto the page, like the fellrunner in its opening section: ‘to talk about / the pleasure principle / of falling downhill fastly’.

Lucy Burnett’s second collection explores how we fetch up with the world in all its variety, difficulty and beauty, ranging across encounters with mountains, love, contemporary politics and visual art.

Ultimately this is a poetry which asserts hope, and playfulness, as strategies for navigating an inherently changeable sense of now.

The event will begin at 19:00 and include readings from the three poets, followed by a discussion with the opportunity to ask questions. Tickets are free but please reserve them here.  For any inquiries about the event please email jazmine@carcanet.co.uk.