© Toby Fitch

Previously published in Aesthetica, and in the poet’s first book, Rawshock.

Rawshock was a co-winner of the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, 2012. It can be purchased directly through http://puncherandwattmann.com/books/book/rawshock

“Toby Fitch’s Rawshock opens onto hell and onto a Eurydice who seems more knowing than she used to, whose eyes tell of gay abandon as well as the old emptying pain. These poems are a fresh, vivid working-through of the myth: a myth that keeps reminding us there’s nothing new under the sun, except when poets strike indelible lines from newly minted words charged with the currents of daily usage. The tone is dark, not bitter; the language maps the landscape of an electrified underground: there is music here, but no birds sing in the trees. The artwork is as skilful as the fine handling of the lines, making poetry anew.”

—Robert Adamson