Slant Light

“This is a beauty of a book, green in a variety of ways, purposeful, lyrical, memorable.”

⎯ Penelope Shuttle

“Slant Light is a book of charms and wonders, full of birds and flowers. But Sarah Westcott is too good a poet to simply charm us, and the work here is fierce with intelligence, compassion and the sheer exuberance of attending to what Hopkins called ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’. A super debut.  ”

— Jacob Polley

“I have been waiting eagerly for a full collection from Sarah Westcott. Now it is here I am dazzled. So imaginative are the poems in Slant Light it's as if she pulls her language from a fantastical place; Westcott takes us deep into the natural world, makes us understand its physical urgency, ‘the insistence of air’. She has a microscopic eye. Everything we encounter here – the bat, the mole, the hare, the flower – is so finely described, things rise up from the page. This is not just a book of poems, it is a book of rich, exquisite shapes, providing a new understanding of how ‘we sense the bright world.”

— Rebecca Goss

“Invoking the sinister, slanted light of Emily Dickinson’s poem, in her first full-length collection Sarah Westcott casts her eye on a world teeming with organisms at once organic, artificial and mystical. Rooted in the natural world, the poems are concerned with the frail membranes that partition plant from animal matter, perfectly embodied in the image of ‘The Vegetable Lamb’ - a mythological plant believed to bear sheep as fruit. Revealing how firmly the spores of the ancient natural world are embedded in the contemporary, the collection is also a stark reminder of a world “quietly consuming itself.” 

— Poetry Book Society

“This collection mixes detailed observation of nature with folklore and at times almost painfully tender personal experiences, real or imagined. Westcott’s poetry is a moving marriage of an eye for nature and an acute understanding of the human heart. Beautifully written, tightly composed, this first collection is full of insight and forges a welcome link between words and nature.”

⎯ John Ingham, Environment Editor, Daily Express

Sarah Westcott's poem “Downy Mildew” is an unexpectedly moving paean to a series of models of microscopic fungi made in the 1930s by the Cambridge mycologist Dillon Weston. “People thought fungi repulsive”, he once wrote, “and I wanted to show how beautiful they can be”. Westcott captures expertly what can be revealed if one only looks closely.

⎯ Jonathan Barnes, The Lancet