Pavilion Poetry Series

A soul’s journey through the night, a missing woman: time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms and voices to make one story of love and loss. In And She Was Corbett combines the fictional spell-making of Haruki Murakami, with the filmic neo-noir of Atom Egoyan (Exotica) and David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive), to push the boundaries of poetic genre, asking us to renegotiate the way we encounter and reconfigure ourselves through trauma, in desire, or as we seek to reassemble ourselves and our past.

November, 3am, and two young lovers are about to meet on the Heathrow Express.
A side street in an unknown city: Felix Morning wakes with no memory. In his pocket is a membership card for a nightclub, The Bunker. With the help of the beautiful Flick, he must recover what he has lost.

Deep into a dangerous love affair, Esther and Iain believe the other can replace what they each have lost – a heart, a gift – but is Esther’s price too high for Iain to pay, and can their love survive?

Who is Esther, where has she come from, and what has she got to do with the woman in the labyrinth? Does Flick belong to the past or to the future? What is memory, and what remains of us without it?

And She Was demands our attention, its startling and dazzling writing asking us to be carried away as we read, but returning us by its end to a place both resolved and transformed.

A Perfect Mirror

by Sarah Corbett

Published 14 March 2018

Walking, getting lost, and finding that home is half way between refuge and a place to look out from at the unsettling and unsettled world, are the dominant themes in Sarah Corbett’s fifth collection. Written from an intimate knowledge of the countryside of the Calder Valley, many of these poems respond to a landscape as beautiful as it is disquieting, troubled by a warming climate and by violence and loss both public and private. A central sequence – part found poem, part assemblage – draws on the Grasmere Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, poems that question the nature of the visionary, the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory; here nature is held up as a mirror where we might see ourselves and our actions reflected. Over all haunts the presence-in-absence of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place the author can see from her bedroom window. Throughout, interior lights – a train on a dark morning, a sudden snowfall, moonlight and starlight, sun on lake water, the love between a parent and child – attempt to balance the darkness.

The Ishtar Gate

by Sarah Corbett

Published 28 April 2025

Self and history collide, selves fracture, the flag is divided, monuments collapse. In her sixth collection, Sarah Corbett considers the fragments we might hold against dissolution, whether personal, national, or global. Midnight in Leningrad, 1940, Anna Akhmatova waits for a poem to arrive, in her hand an egg; on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a writer recalls her breakdown as a student in 1989. In the pandemic year an isolated artist communes with a tree; visitors to an art gallery are led on a journey of rebirth; missives find their way back to us from a flooded world. The book opens with an invocation to the goddess Ishtar, and closes with the goddess rising from a spring thirty years in the future, ‘the world’s unspoken desire’ to be reborn. A series of ekphrastic ‘interventions’ respond to 20th century European cinema, the work of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, and consider what art can offer in face of the predicaments we find ourselves in. Summoning the ‘Red horse of time, white horse of poetry, blue horse of dreams,’ poetry’s answer is the search for connection, love; and for presence, where we might meet each other, transcendent.