Waking in Winter - Anna Wigley's third volume of poetry - is a collection of celebrations and laments, lyrics to the living and dead. Attuned to the pressures of history, these poems explore grief, love and the uncanniness of the everyday. Bringing together pieces on themes as diverse as missing cats, car advertisements and Chinese foot-binding, the collection displays a playfulness alongside more elegiac and nostalgic moods. As in her previous collections, The Bird Hospital (2002) and Dürer's Hare (2005), the author continues to eschew fashionably vernacular accents and ironies in favour of a personal, authentic voice and a spiritual engagement with her environment, both urban and rural. At the same time, Waking in Winter displays Anna Wigley as a literary force to be reckoned with.
