Series:

The Emma Press Pamphlets

1 primary work • 2 total works

Book 2

Cover of AWOL

AWOL

by John Fuller and Andrew Wynn Owen

Published 22 October 2015
In rural Wales, wandering the dunes west of Pwllheli, John Fuller has composed a letter on the subject of travel: warning against it, wondering about people’s presences and absences, and serenely admiring ‘the Wales of sheep and song’. His correspondent, young Andrew Wynn Owen, replies with friendly enthusiasm, matching John’s poetic form while flouting his advice and hopping from gallery to garret via Luxembourg and Venice. Between them, they consider: is it better to risk seeming ‘stay-at-home, | A stick in mud’ or ‘to pass life scared | Of stillnesses’ AWOL is an infinitely charming collaboration between the eminent poet John Fuller, with a career spanning over 50 years, and bright young poet Andrew Wynn Owen, whose first pamphlet was published in 2014. Beautifully produced in a large square format, this book is illustrated throughout in full-colour with watercolours and line drawings by Emma Wright. The epistolary poems are composed in terza rima in tetrameter lines, reflecting both poets’ love of metre and formal challenges.

Cover of Raspberries for the Ferry

Andrew Wynn Owen embraces a variety of formal structures and imbues everything with lively sensuality. Highlights of this collection include a paean to raspberries – 'so sweet they force you into song / And fill your head with dreams of hedon / -istic gymnasts born in Sweden' – and pair of poems inspired by the love letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. These are gorgeous, tart and juicy poems which revel in language and are sure to win an adoring readership.

Andrew Wynn Owen is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In 2015, he received an Eric Gregory Award and, in 2014, Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize. His first poetry pamphlet, Raspberries for the Ferry, was published by the Emma Press in 2014, followed by a collaboration with John Fuller, AWOL, in 2015.