Asylum

A stunning collection about a poet visiting the Underworld – in the caves of the Mendips.

There’s something of the performance artist about Borodale as he takes his readers step by step through every stage of his adventures.

Sean Borodale was born in London and works as a poet and artist. His first collection of poetry, Bee Journal, was shortlisted for the 2012 Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2014 he was selected as one of twenty Next Generation Poets. He currently teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.

Like his two previous books, Asylum was written live on-site; in this case deep within the caves, mines, quarries, geological and archaeological horizons of the Mendip Hills in Somerset. The poems stage modes of exile in the darkness of earth, enacting solidarity with those others who have made their journey into the underworld – Dante, Orpheus, blinded Oedipus, Euripides. These are semi-dramatic voicings, staged across the thirty-mile theatre of the Mendip subterranean: each an act of recovery, of rescue. Traversing the broken, collapsed, eroded stones, looking for voices that express the damaged and the damned, Asylum pays homage to the darkness of the human cave: its memories and ancient histories, and to its more contemporary signals – internationally owned quarries, abandoned coal mines, decommissioned Cold War bunkers. 
 
As with Bee Journal and Human Work, these poems take on the nature of the experience recorded. Written blind, as it were, the diction here becomes mineral, deeply tactile – hard and granular, alert to sound in its own blackness. Descending underground with the poet is to enter a theatre of heightened senses, and these extraordinary poems feel both unearthed and unearthly.

Bee Journal (The Birds and the Bees)

The Birds and the Bees series from Vintage Classics - beautiful editions of the finest British nature writing

Sean Borodale is without doubt the most exciting new poet I have read since Alice Oswald. His Bee Journal raises the bar for us all and announces a thrilling new voice in British poetry

Truly heady and intense poems, honey itself in poetic form, a sustained tour de force of language and thought

This book is a kind of uncut home-movie of bees. I like its oddness and hurriedness, its way of catching the world exactly as it happens in the split-second before it sets into poetry. These are pre-poems, note-poems dictated by phenomena. Their context is bees, but their subject (intriguingly) is Time...

Harbours great energy and abundant imagination...a strikingly original voice

Borodale is an extremely accomplished poet…the most beautiful expression of what it is like to live with bees that you could hope to find…they show a wonderful clarity of thought and expression and a great talent for capturing an impression. The recent rising popularity of beekeeping has spawned a number of popular books on the subject but this towers above them all in ambition and emotional effect. It is an exquisite window into bees and beekeeping

Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal lifts the veil on the apiarists life and goes to the heart of the hive… The dense and intense language is the verbal equivalent of the honey that delights the tongue

Book to savour and reserve for treat reading, a bit like the best honey…a word-filled jar of golden treasure

This beekeeping journal in verse form provides an intimate portrait.

The past few summers in the states as well as here in the UK I’ve become aware the music of buzzing insects such as bees has dimmed and it concerns me. Borodale’s poems are like honey on toast, a reminder of what I want my grandchildren to taste in the future as sweetly as I have in the past.

Bee Journal is a poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive. 
 
 It observes the living architecture of the comb, the range and locality of the colony; its flights, flowers, water sources, parasites, lives and deaths. Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and scrutiny of life and death in nature. The language is dense and clotted, the imagery thrillingly fresh, and the observing eye close, scrupulous and full of wonder. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

A Poet's Cookbook

Human Work

A stunning collection about the rites and rituals of cooking by one of Britain’s best new poets.

If you love cooking, and words…this book, given half a chance, will soon be engraved on your heart.

This is a stunning collection of poems about the rites, rituals and adventures of cooking. Just like the best dishes, everything combines wonderfully to produce subtle tastes and thoughts which linger in the mind after the book has been closed. A delicious treat.

Wonderful, original and sustaining poems.

He is a marvellous poet, a man who knows his artichokes.

Human Work was written while cooking. It is the narrative of a voice in domesticity, at the alchemical heart of home – the hearth, or Hestia – where the kitchen is a stage for acts of eating and uttering; for the ebb and flow to the human mouth. The poems were written ‘live’ among pots and pans, beside chopping boards, between plates, bowls, knives, forks, spoons, and servings. Their time is the hybrid time of writing and cooking – where the dimensions of two activities hinge together. The poems occupy a shared space; the work is one work. They live together and cross-talk, like figures in a room, invoking an old story, perhaps one of our very first: how we make food to eat and share, how we draw and transform others’ bodies into being our own flesh and life. Implicit in ingredients are the stories of matter itself: without food there can be no other stories. 
 
Like the poems of Bee Journal these poems started life in notebooks, in situ. Their pages seem marked with the very process of their making: jam, grease, wine stains, crumbs of flour and spice, flecks of meat, fish, fruit, vegetable. Like Bee Journal, this is a book about communal purpose, a record of risk and response – a poetry of the moment, both immemorial and thrillingly modern.

Bee Journal

One of the most unusual and exciting poetry debuts in years, and a stunning portrait of life as an apiarist. Shortlisted for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize

A Bee Journal is like no other, for the bees are real, and the book is an accurate study of an apiarist’s year, each poem a perfect study, a perfect poem.

Bee Journal is a startlingly original poetry sequence: a poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive, from the collection of a small nucleus on the first day to the capture of a swarm two years later. It observes the living architecture of the comb, the range and locality of the colony; its flights, flowers, water sources, parasites, lives and deaths. 
 
These poems were written at the hive wearing a veil and gloves, and the journal is an intrinsic part of the kinetic activity of keeping bees: making 'tiny, regular checks' in the turn around the central figure of the sun, and minute exploratory interventions through the round of the year. The book is full of moments of revelation - particularly of the relationship between the domestic and the wild. In attempting to record and invoke something of the complexity of the relationship between 'keeper' and 'kept' it tunes ear and speech towards the ecstasy of bees, between the known and the unknown. 
 
Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and deep scrutiny of life and death in nature. The language itself is dense and clotted, the imagery thrillingly fresh, and the observing eye close, scrupulous and full of wonder. Bee Journal is one of the most unusual and exciting poetry debuts in years.

Sean Borodale

Borodale's writing offers both passport and revelation; his subjects are often close to death, or decay... In poems as finely balanced and perilous as watercolour paintings, he builds a world of threat, yet also with reverence for the tones and form of the most vulnerable.

Extraordinary...Every page, nearly every stanza of this collection bears such treasures.

The poems of Inmates stage encounters with insects at sites and moments of their refuge, torpor, hatching or fighting, of traversing a floor in the night or climbing a wall, of their death and decay – all in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates. 
 
There is an urgency to these poems, emerging from the instant of their writing, and the close attention Borodale brings to his observation of the natural world results in poems of real intensity. Inmates is an attempt to co-exist with the natural world – examining it, intimately, at the edge of language itself, where the human voice begins to break apart.

Sean Borodale

Praise for Inmates

Borodale's writing offers both passport and revelation; his subjects are often close to death, or decay... In poems as finely balanced and perilous as watercolour paintings, he builds a world of threat, yet also wit ...

Extraordinary...Every page, nearly every stanza of this collection bears such treasures.

Books by Sean Borodale

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