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In his bold new collection, David Morley, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, casts off the worlds of myth and magical fable to focus on the fiercely personal. ‘Love teaches you how to mind / And how to mend’, he writes in ‘After a Song by Gustav Mahler’. In The Magic of What’s There Morley uses his eye for precise detail and his linguistic invention to explore childhood suffering and, in counterbalance, the joys of love, friendship and parenthood. He finds the elements of epic in the everyday, navigating the complex connections between past and present selves. His poems acknowledge our capacity for cruelty, but also for love, tenderness and mercy.

The Magic of What's There