Book of Days

Overview

Book of Days is a long poem recounting a journey along the popular pilgrimage route, or 'Camino' to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain. Animated by song and conversation, the poem is filled with the stories of those encountered along the way, combining a multi-voiced soundscape with vivid verbal sketches of landscape and architecture. The possibilities and contradictions of a twenty-first-century pilgrimage are revealed: inevitably informed by tourism and technology, yet offering new kinds of fellowship and connection in an age of individualism and rootlessness. Book of Days can be read as a travel memoir, a meditation on community and solitude, on friendship and sisterhood, and on spirituality. What pilgrims seek on setting out and what they discover as they go prove to be complementary. Phoebe Power's debut collection, Shrines of Upper Austria (2018), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize and won the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection. Book of Days extends the formal and thematic concerns of the first book, travelling a new set of paths but with the same restless curiosity and celebratory wonder.

Reviews

'Surprising, observed with a sharp eye for detail and a quick sense of humour [...] Power's utterly contemporary voice is one you want to hear more from.' —Bidisha, judge of the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2018 [Praise for Shrines of Upper Austria]

Author Biography

Phoebe Power's Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018) received the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was further shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Phoebe's other publications include Sea Change (Guillemot Press, 2021, with Katrina Porteous), an illustrated pamphlet about the Durham coast; and Harp Duet (2016). She is currently based in York.