Understudies : New and Selected Poems

Since first appearing in Late Crossing in the late Nineties, Anne-Marie Fyfe''s life studies have focused increasingly on the disconcerting underside of small-town and suburban banality: on the underlit corners of apartments, waiting rooms, underpasses; on doppelgangers and stand-ins; on clandestine, undercover operations and escapades.

Understudies brings together new poems of optimism and isolation, of assumed and confused identities, with some of the poems from The Ghost Twin (2005), Tickets from a Blank Window (2004) and Late Crossing that first brought readers into this world of lives at once chaotic and oddly consolatory that lie below placid surfaces.

"Anne-Marie Fyfe reminds us of the skins we inhabit and shed… This is fine poetry."
John Greening, TLS

"A rich humanity informs Anne-Marie Fyfe''s new work. The vision is detailed, the voice rings true."
Thomas Lynch

"Poem after poem has this quiet musicality, along with a persuasive and obstinate trust in what Wordsworth called ''the essential passions of the heart''."
Michael O''Neill, The London Magazine

"... a lyric clarity, an ontological accuracy and unflinching vigilance that is both spiritual and revelatory."
Tom Paulin

"... taut, eloquent and deeply felt. Her poems are haunted by what the past does to the present, and by the physical relics of that past which is only relayed in snatches."
Helen Dunmore

Anne-Marie Fyfe was born in Cushendall, County Antrim. She organises the fortnightly Coffee House Poetry series of readings and classes at London''s Troubadour, as well as the annual John Hewitt Spring Festival in the Antrim Glens. Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and magazines and awarded prizes in major poetry competitions including Arvon, Bridport and the National Poetry Competition. In 2002 she received an Authors'' Foundation Award, and in 2003 she was writer-in-residence at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.