‘Women of the Tender Night is a celebration of desire, intellect, and the fleeting beauty of modern love…. rich in literary and cultural intertextuality…celebrating the sapiosexual spark that runs through desire, observation, and memory… from intimate domestic moments to mythic, symbolic heights, English writes of the joy, the longing, and the impermanence of love with unflinching honesty…a poetry that is at once sensual, tender, and heartbreakingly alive.’
-Samatar Elmi, author of The Epic of Cader Idris (Bloomsbury, 2024)
A collection of poems exploring sensuality, sex, love and longing. In the cultic tradition of mischievous Eros, God of love, the embodiment of all desire, who for Plato symbolises intellectual as well as sexual love, and Solomon’s Song of Songs, the poems are a human celebration of desire and its consequential sorrows. They capture the fleeting nature of encounters, emotions and the romantic present moment that brings two people together, that can arise with all its electricity and atmosphere, but also as quickly dissolve back into the ether of contemporary life. With an honesty and open language, the poems look to find a deeper truth about human love, the moments that move us, and the people that create longing within ourselves, Petrarch’s Laura, Catullus’ Lesbia, Graves’ White Goddess, the poetic muse that is unattainable but a revelation of creativity. Erotic in the vein of Rochester, Verlaine, Botto and Pickard, Women of the Tender Night is an exploration of the compassion of human connectivity and the transcendence of love.
Edmund Francis English was born in 1989. His work has been published by Pilot Press, Subs, Greyscale, Grapevine and Papaya Press. He has performed and exhibited at Newcastle Poetry Festival, Durham Book Festival, Tate London, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Newbridge Project. He lives in Bristol and runs the Selah! Underground River Poetry Nights.
KV18
ISBN 9781917998079
84 pp.
A6 pocket paperback.
Printed on fully recycled paper.
10 Copies signed by the author.
