Amber
Iris Anne Lewis
ISBN 9781916333987
 
A visionary poet with a richly lyrical and transportative voice, Lewis takes us travelling through time in her beautifully realised and vivid poems. Without losing a sense of the real, this gifted poet enables her readers to experience deepest history, myth and private emotional worlds. These are poems that are wide-eyed with wonder, mesmerising and magical. This is poetry at its most alchemical.
(Anna Saunders, director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival)
 
Iris Anne Lewis’s Amber is a collection built on the bones of the past. Her imagination finds form in ancient history, stories and myths. The language is fresh and precise, finding shape in a range of voices. The poems are well made and contemporary, leading the reader to find the relevance of old ways to today’s human condition. This is especially apparent in the women who are given voice or space; Grendel’s mother resonates with so many women who are only someone’s mother and don’t have their own name, a milkmaid from a painting knows what work is needed to feed hungry children, Frink’s Walking Madonna ‘strides away from the church / heads into the town’.
(Angela France)

Iris Anne Lewis is a poet who holds us in her thrall. In Lewis's work, we time-travel, plunge back deep into the past and are exposed to the alchemy of the word. These are poems of fire and ice, of liminal spaces and ritual. A poet of great scope and ambition.
(Matthew M. C. Smith, author of The Keeper of Aeons and Paviland: Ice and Fire)