Wilder
Jemma Borg
We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.
To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.
From the publisher
Shortlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022
What is still wild in us – and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg’s second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante’s forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to ‘break ourselves each against the beauty of the other’. They call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are, in connection with the complex web of life in what Mary Midgley called an ‘extended sympathy’, and to consider wildness as a process of becoming, reforming and growth. We do not live in a time when we can afford denial. Instead, by being willing to enter despair, might we find what Gary Snyder described as ‘the real world to which we belong’ and recover the means to save what we are destroying?
‘A book about seeing through the dark, Jemma Borg's Wilder enacts a subtle illumination between the crepuscular and haptic and the dazzling and epigrammatic. Light is life itself, photosynthesising, meteorological, caught in poems similarly, beguilingly, changeable, imbued with a timeless and deep ecological knowing, the fruitful surrender of the human heart.’
Linda France
‘The versatility of this work bears witness to a very unusual combination of linguistic confidence and restless intelligence. Jemma Borg is no-one’s kind of poet but her own and that’s an extraordinary achievement.’
Susan Wicks