Before We Go Any Further

This first collection by New Poetries poet and Telegraph poetry editor is at once brilliantly witty in language and formal ambition, and wryly dark in its themes.

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Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2024

In Tristram Fane Saunders' first collection, readers encounter a poet whose ingenious forms dazzle, even while exploring darker themes. Drawing on delicious, unconventional rhymes and rhythms, Before We Go Any Further conjures a contemporary London as it maps the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances. 

Sphinxes and sea-creatures, sleepwalkers and surrealists visit poems about art and friendship, poems that are 'trying to tilt toward love', but 'can't help tugging/at the invisibly thin/line between true and honest'. They discover wry humour in that struggle.