This is Josephine Dickinson's second collection, and contains over 30 poems including by far her most ambitious to date, the long, diary-style On the Wind, written at the time of the avoidable foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001, which devastated farming communities and the rural economy, especially in the North of England.
The natural world is a major source of inspiration for her, but she also engages with contemporary political issues such as terrorism, responding to the events of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath. Other poems, written in an equally accessible style, are more personal and domestic. The voice of the title is that lost voice barely remembered from childhood, found again - where?
Josephine Dickinson's first collection, Scarberry Hill, was published by The Rialto in 2001. Julia Casterton wrote in Ambit: 'Its first strength is the rich interior world, and Dickinson embodies this interiority in poems that are both formally satisfying and tonally so different that sometimes it really is like reading a new tongue.' Writing inThe North Paul Munden said: 'The lambs were still running makes Ted Hughes's February look positively tame.'
The Voice costs £7.50 and was published in 2003.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-64-3
Josephine Dickinson was born in South London in 1957. At the age of six she became profoundly deaf overnight. After reading Classics at Oxford and teaching music for many years, she worked for Shape London, organising arts access projects in Wandsworth, and then for the South Bank Centre in music education. As a composer she studied with Michael Finnissy and Richard Barrett.
In 1994 she moved the high Pennines, where she still lives on a small hill farm close to the small Cumbrian market town of Alston.
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