Inklings

'Inklings' demonstrates Sarah Westcott's adaptability, her willingness to extend her voice to subjects as diverse as death, sex, the environment and trust it to retain its essential quality of sharply-tuned narrative and nuanced leaps of discovery.

That she succeeds is testament to a poet who has found comfort in her quirky, unsettling register. Nevertheless, that comfort never slides into complacency; 'Inklings' is a pamphlet that retains significant emotional ballast, the occasional direct line cutting hard to jolt the reader into recognition of new truths. The contrast between the easy narrative lyric and the brutal chiselled lines is the tension that drives this striking début.

Published by Flipped Eye, 2013.

Winner of the Venture Award.

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice, winter 2013.

Praise for Inklings

  • “Inklings stands out for its dark but celebratory vision and linguistic richness, sustained through a remarkable range of subject matter. This is a generous, outward looking collection that finds the uncanny in the everyday. Westcott writes lines at once punchy and delicate…Inklings is a work of personal integrity and otherworldly imagination.
“

    ⎯ Poetry Book Society Selectors’ Comment

  • “Sarah Westcott's poetry is exuberant, generous and edgy. The poems in this pamphlet offer a brilliant introduction to a talented writer.
”

    — David Morley

  • “A high level of craft and finely nuanced language. The emotion in poems like 'Vegetable' is raw and should reach many.”

    — Natalie Teitler

You might like to see my other Collections.