Scale Av Mina Gorji

Mina Gorji's second book is full of creatures and their habitats. The poems see and see truly, the poet having managed the hardest task of all, which is, Gertrude Stein tells us, to see so purely that the I is no longer present. Scale builds on the considerable achievement of her first book, The Art of Escape (2019).When it was selected for the Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (January 2020), Tristram Fane Saunders spoke of Gorji's 'meticulous explorations' of 'the strange and sometimes darker side of nature' and 'the different forms and meanings of escape: dandelions crossing the ocean, the journey of a gall wasp from Aleppo to England, the transformation of an armadillo into music.' Of course, such poems feed into current ecological concerns, but in no conventional or cliched way. Marina Warner describes the poems as 'building a place of safety-for herself, her family, her readers, and all those who are wandering and uprooted; her poetic methods take their cue from the many marvellous creatures she evokes and the multiple protective measures they adopt-nests, camouflage, mimicry, display. Above all, language can help create shelter.Tehran-born, Mina Gorji grew up in London. She studied at Cambridge and Oxford and is now a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge and a senior lecturer in the faculty of English. She writes prose about John Clare, weeds, prepositions, rudeness, awkwardness and literary allusion.