Night Tree

Draycott Jane

This collection travels many paths and by-ways, beside some of which lie burning cars, or a young man speechless on a forest floor, or girls lost far from home. And there is a lighthouse... Travellers pass along these ways, in the darkness, in transit, hoping for safe passage through unknown territory. All are imagined with what Sean O'Brien describes as Draycott's "quizzical, exultant, exact music".

"The Night Tree" is Jane Draycott's second book of poems, following "Prince Rupert's Drop", a Poetry Book Society Recommendation short listed for the Forward Prize in 1999, and two smaller collections, "Tideway" (Two Rivers Press, 2002, illustrated by Peter Hay) and "No Theatre" (Smith/Doorstop) short listed for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 1997.

About the Author

Jane Draycott was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, "Prince Rupert's Drop" (Carcanet / OxfordPoets), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999. In 2002 she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, the year of her second collection, "The Night Tree", she was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society's "Next Generation" list of poets. Her third collection "Over" (Carcanet / OxfordPoets) was shortlisted for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize, and her translation of the 14th-century "Pearl" (Carcanet / OxfordPoets 2011) is a PBS Recommendation and winner of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation. Jane Draycott's other books include "No Theatre" (Smith / Doorstop 1998, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection), "Christina the Astonishing" (with Lesley Saunders and Peter Hay, 1998) and "Tideway" (illustrated by Peter Hay, 2002), both from Two Rivers Press. She lives in Oxfordshire and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and the University of Lancaster.

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