Kona Macphee's What Long Miles is a characteristically eclectic collection from an ever-inventive writer, the winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for her previous collection, Perfect Blue. The poems range widely - nature and culture, body and psyche, the urban and the rural, the everyday and the revelatory - driven by a poetic sensibility both captivated by nuance and ever in search of essence. Woven throughout the collection's diversity of styles and subjects is the theme of human loneliness, a hurt that the poems touch on again and again, and for which there is no easy remedy. Whether it's a pitch-perfect formal poem, a darkly comic narrative or an achingly melancholic lyric, Kona Macphee's work displays her trademark technical panache and musician's deftness with the aural possibilities of language. The poems in What Long Miles exemplify her striking ability to blend hard-won emotional insight with a clear outward gaze and a deep, compassionate engagement with the world.
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