Inklings

Inklings, is the debut poetry pamphlet of Sarah Westcott, runner up in the inaugural Venture Award for poetry.

''Inklings'' demonstrates Sarah Westcott''s adaptability, her willingness to extend her voice to subjects as diverse as death, sex, the environment and trust it to retain its essential quality of sharply-tuned narrative and nuanced leaps of discovery. That she succeeds is testament to a poet who has found comfort in her quirky, unsettling register. Nevertheless, that comfort never slides into complacency; ''Inklings'' is a pamphlet that retains significant emotional ballast, the occasional direct line cutting hard to jolt the reader into recognition of new truths. The contrast between the easy narrative lyric and the brutal chiselled lines is the tension that drives this striking début. ''Sarah Westcott''s poetry is exuberant, generous and edgy. The poems in this pamphlet offer a brilliant introduction to a talented writer''. - David Morley''A high level of craft and finely nuanced language. The emotion in poems like ''Vegetable'' is raw and should, reach many.'' - Nathalie TeitlerSarah Westcott grew up in north Devon and lives in Kent with her family. Her poetry has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, most recently Magma, Poetry Wales and Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London and a science degree. Sarah has been commended in competitions including the Mslexia Poetry Competition in 2008 and 2010 and she won the inaugural Awel Aman Tawe Climate Change poetry competition in 2011. After a spell teaching English abroad, she has worked as a newspaper journalist for many years. An excerpt from ''Inklings'', her début poetry pamphlet, was runner up in the Venture Award for poetry.