Martha Kapos
Martha was born in New Haven, Connecticut and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having completed a degree in Classics at Harvard, she came to London for a gap year to study Painting and the History of Art at the Chelsea School of Art and never returned. She stayed on to teach there until 2001 when she became Assistant Poetry Editor of Poetry London. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Wales, The Manhattan Review, and the TLS. A selection of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2002: An Anthology published by Carcanet. My Nights in Cupid’s Palace (Enitharmon, 2003) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and won the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection. Her most recent collections, Supreme Being (Enitharmon, 2008) and The Likeness (Enitharmon 2014), were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
Supreme Being
Supreme Being
Following her prize-winning first collection, Martha Kapos again captures an extraordinary range of perceptions and emotion. Her style is highly original, a sort of internal Cubism, conveying a feeling-state by observing it precisely through many sharply nuanced images and from many angles. She creates a distinctive, unique atmosphere - graver here than in her previous collection. Supreme Being is both a huge hymn of praise for 'life', for ordinary experiencing, and at the same time faces very movingly and directly the incomprehensibility of loss. The loss of someone else, deeply known and loved, and the awareness, too, of the coming loss of the...
£8.95
The Likeness
These poems represent an act of reclamation or capture; an attempt to retrieve someone whose loss has been experienced through illness and finally death. Taking as an epigraph a line from Richard Wilbur "… a thing is most itself when likened" Kapos discovers various viewpoints from which to try to see the thing "being most itself". In every case metaphor is the guiding principle in these poems, which address how a figure is brought back to life through a process whose essence is poetic. The Likeness is a sustained elegy, an unfolding study in psychology and visual observation, and an...
£9.99