The Third City

Description

In The Third City, his most remarkable collection to date, James Peake once more offers us his unique combination of dream-like fluency and intellectual rigour. New and returning readers will discover an even more expansive poet in these pages, one who in poem after poem uncovers our capacity to love in full knowledge of the odds.

Here Peake confirms his reputation for ‘pin-sharp and trance-like poems’ (Wild Court) which ‘show us different ways of seeing’ (Raceme). He is a poet of deep originality whose works of artful indirection fully realise our daily world, even as they transform its familiar constraints into staging posts for larger, less comprehensible, places.

‘Elegant, haunted, mesmerizingly rich yet somehow untamed, James Peake’s poems provoke a hydra-headed state of transportation, tremors in the substrate, the most pleasurable kind of sensory bewilderment. Like the etched-in-glass meditations of some spectral witness, Peake’s vision is singular, captivating, not easily shaken off’ – KEN BABSTOCK

‘This is a finely rendered book of “unforgetting.” Peake’s is an “educated eye,” tuned to the imperfected and edible world, to various types of fallen, or falling regimes – domestic and global – and moving across all manner of thresholds and ruptures. These are poems of love, and recapturing, “pointedly constructed” but open to accident, and to feeling, coming together to form a “pluperfect photograph” of what has most mattered, and will continue to. Peake is a sophisticated, thoughtful and wide-ranging poet, and this is his best book to date’ – DECLAN RYAN

James Peake. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, April 2025, 52 pages.