Pilgrim's Flower

Rachael Boasts first collection Sidereal was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second Pilgrim''s Flower richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent but where Sidereals gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens Boasts focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings lifes intoxicants love nature literature friendship and other forms and methods of transcendence and sees Boasts pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim''s Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things the slippage between what we think we know and what is actually there and in doing so brings the language of rite observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.