The Observances

In the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work.

Winner of the 2016 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Shortlisted for the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize. Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Poetry Award. In the informal rituals of the tide remaking its tideline, of a painter absorbed in the act of painting or of an old couple greeting the night, the English poet Kate Miller sees and charts the creative process at work. As its title suggests, Miller's striking debut collection explores perception, the poet's eye and ear trained on distances that stretch beyond comfort zones. This is a book full of movement: even quiet reflections on home and family life are rarely still. Throughout the collection Miller dwells on the unfixed and restless image and shows herself as subject to it - to the difficult illusion of physical energy in sculpture, to the changeability of skies and the insistent rhythm and presence of the sea.