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Poetry in Print

Moon for Sale, Carcanet, 2017

Energetic, idealistic, arch, soulful, delicate, sensual, funny, ferociously serious, romantic, political: Moon for Sale is Richard Price's most ambitious collection yet.

"He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers." -- Maureen N. McLane

"...moments of sudden natural beauty are unexpected and lovely accompaniments to the jaunty and memorable style of Moon for Sale." -- Suzannah V. Evans, Tears in the Fence

"Dainty Opera" in Moon for Sale is a tour de force sex poem of 100 lines. His work is never less than interesting -- even when he baffles -- and there are half a dozen poems of real greatness." -- Martyn Crucefix, Magma.

Small World, Carcanet, 2012

"A work of genius" -- Louise Welsh.

SMIT Creative Scotland Poetry Book of the Year

"That hoarding of the precious before it's gone, not only for the parent but for the child who will inherit the memory, the story, is beautifully achieved, as is the unbridgeable distance between parent and child."
-- Tony Williams.

"It is the sense of the spaciousness of Price’s language that I particularly came to admire in this book. In his longer poems there is a roominess: nothing is easily locked down into simple structures; the complexity of thought and sensation is given room to be fully expressed, not simplified, yet remain accessible. I might call what Richard Price has achieved the new personal."
-- Caroline Clark.

Rays, Carcanet, 2009

Emerging from a restless, sleepless landscape that is half personal, half state-of-the-nation, the love poems in Rays create a dreamy island between the solace of haiku and the precisions of Emily Dickinson. Price conjures the Renaissance poet Louise Labé and an imaginary band, The Loss Adjusters, to deliver a lyrical work of wit and depth: from sonnet through canzone to strange, shimmering new forms, Rays is an astonishingly accomplished exploration of love and desire.

"Love is the subject of Price's third collection, Rays. He opens with an antic sizzle: a reworking of [Shakespeare's] Sonnet XVIII in which he manages the scarcely credible feat of taking on the Bard and holding his own, coming up with a closing couplet ("So long as folk can breathe or eyes can see / so this will live, and this gives life to you and me.") that actually expands on the original. After this, however, the bulk of the poems are distillations; seekings-out of the essence of the words that we use to describe love. Insomnia is a recurring motif, and there is a flavour here of those moments on the edge of consciousness where words fall into each other and sense is derived as much from sound and rhythm as it is from meaning. In the beautiful 'Langour's whispers" words slide and elide to create the lush eroticism of lines such as "Touch, and touch's could-be / deep shallows, lap / and kiss, sense-sipping lips, / finger-tips." In Price's poetry, as in love, language hovers on the brink of dissolution." -- Sarah Crown, Poetry Review

David Wheatley in The Guardian acclaims this "intensely tactile poet", these "exquisite snapshots of the natural world", these poems "with a fire-work fizz of urgency in their tail". [Read full review]

"If you find yourselves up in the small hours reading these poems, Price’s stoical, beautiful, illogical meditations on the condition will keep you company." -- Julia Bird reviews Rays in Poetry London

"Last year a talented poet friend of mine was short-listed for the Michael Marks pamphlet award and I went along to hear her and the other contenders read. Richard Price gave a wonderful speech about the importance of the pamphlet as a form for poetry, its great tradition of showcasing a poet’s work, the fact that the pamphlet has a sense of limitation, distilment, condensation that makes it quite distinctive. Price is a champion of the form and some of the nine sections in Rays began their lives as limited edition pamphlets. Though the sections have subtle, echoing relationships between one another, there is a sense of each as a particular poetic space. This is a particular strength of the collection, allowing it to feel startlingly fresh and alive, but also because the reader gets the sense of a poet that is interested in poetry as a collaborative endeavour. Pamphlets are lovingly created and this is a collective process, they are often the result of more than one artist getting together to explore an idea, they are attentive to the materiality of reading and of language itself. All of this is apparent in Price’s work.[...] As the collection moves on, it seems to me that love becomes its real focus. Not a simply understood or clichéd version of love, but love in all it’s quirky, witty and infuriating guises. The poems become spare, beautiful distillations and the reader feels as though they are walking into an apothecary’s shop, sniffing and tasting tiny bottles of essences of thought, idea, feeling.[...] Price has a voice of his own, which comes through in all the work, but his generosity and lack of ego as a poet allow him to speak through and with others, to translate, to empathise. Price is a poet who listens, and this makes his work sing." -- Abi Curtis reviews Rays on Eyewear

"Richard Price is, by far, the most gifted Scottish poet of his generation and he gets better book by beguiling book. Rays has wit, emotional depth, lyrical intensity, technical assurance, all enviably and uniquely present." -- Donny O'Rourke, Books of the Year, The Scotsman

Read From the moment | Like a student gardener | Ties | Dippers | Darkness and Dazzle

little but often, design by Ronald King, Circle Press, 2008

"May I suggest we both invest / in a high-frisk mutual trust" - Richard Price and Ronald King meet again in this exquisite artist's book with a witty pop-up art-object about desire, loneliness, anger and love.

Buy this book direct from Circle Press

Greenfields, Carcanet, 2007

Price's 'most Scottish' book, with story-poems, ballads, memories and reflections of Renfrewshire, just southwest of Glasgow. A companion in a sense to his short stories A Boy in Summer.

Shortlisted for the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year

-- containing "one of the great love poems in English in recent times" - Simon Smith, PN Review

Sample poems: Open the Paper Window | Stopper

Lucky Day, Carcanet, 2005

Shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, this features Price's two most renowned sequences: the prose-poems of A Spelthorne Birdlist which includes Hedge Sparrows, the poem which later represented the UK in the cultural programme of the London 2012 Olympics, and Hand Held, the award-winning sequence about his experience as a father of a severely disabled daughter.

"This is a felicitous gathering of Richard Price's unusual, poignant and funny poetry, which has been appearing in chapbooks, magazines and beautiful small-press volumes for more than a decade. They are clear, witty, intelligent, versatile and often highly moving; superb examples of a hard-earned surface simplicity conveying oceanic depths of feeling and thought. His lyric sequence "Hand Held", about a daughter with learning difficulties, is a masterpiece of spare, hesitant, minimal language. Price excels at rendering and exploiting the pregnant pauses and telling gaps in human speech." - Robert Potts, The Guardian

Sample poem: "Big Bang research"


   
 
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