The Skylark’s Call

Published by Dempsey & Windle in November 2020
​ISBN 978-1-913329-21-1
Paperback, 23 x 15.8cm, 76 pages
RRP £10.00 

The Skylark’s Call is Paul Jeffcutt’s second collection of poetry. The theme of the book is the vitality and vulnerability of everyday life. This is a subject he knows intimately, for all of the poems were written during his years of treatment for and recovery from cancer. The poems don’t seek to address his cancer experience directly, but reflect on the memories and meanings that surround a cluster of places, people and artefacts. Together the poems explore the fragile and often invisible boundary between life and death. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, this is a territory we are all now having to deal with.

‘In The Skylark’s Call, Paul Jeffcutt proves himself to be a poet at ease with subjects that so many make a mess of. All the human condition, in its glorious difficulty, is here: the spiritual, the erotic, cancer, politics and history. But the making of these poems is his unshowy expertise with language. It is only a matter of time before he acquires the readership that poetry such as this ultimately insists on.’ —Kevin Higgins 

‘The Skylark’s Call takes us on an exhilarating and affecting journey through both the physical world and the human psyche. We see these landscapes through a huge range of characters, from Robert Louis Stevenson to a man in a gorilla suit, revealing not just a host of stories, but also the poet’s sharp eye for observation. We are left with a marvellous sense of what it is to be alive, of the urgency of life.’ —Moyra Donaldson

‘Paul Jeffcutt’s debut collection was alert to mythology, the past and mortality, with a sense of justice very much of the present. The poems in his long-awaited second collection are abrim with those same concerns, but with a new economy, a brusque close attention to the bits of language itself, and with a purposeful outrage. His is a vividly-expressed lyric gift that builds to a memorable collection.’ —Damian Smyth

‘These poems represent a serious reckoning with the horrors and beauties of life, death and our shared common world. Stark, simple ― but never less than complex.’ —Ian Sansom