Full Description
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025
Highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2024
Rebecca Hurst's first collection bridges memory and observation,
noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it.
The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other
worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images - from the folk
traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a
nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a
Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of
etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems
of The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.
