What Long Miles

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 the poet finds 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 a trademark technical panache and a 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.