BOOKS
let him bring a shrubbe, The Maker’s Press, July 2023
Poems exploring the life and music of the composer Gerald Finzi.
Available to buy here: https://themakerspress.com/product/towers-let-him-bring-a-shrubbe/
Oak, Picador November 2021
A Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian
“Oak wins its power through an extraordinary act of imaginative voicing, and accomplishes the most important work of the nature poem: to take the reader out of themselves, and into the larger world they also inhabit.”
The Violin Forest, HappenStance Press 2019
“The natural world permeates her work, its intense existence resonant in thought, word and sound. Here are poems in which yews and oak trees, foxes and owls, wisteria and roses (a few of the players) are events in themselves.
Although these lyrics are typically brief, their music could fill whole libraries.”
The Remedies, Picador 2016
Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer
“Katharine Towers' second collection is a book of small wonders. From a house drowning in roses to crickets on an August day, from Nerval's pet lobster to the surrealism of flower remedies, these poems not only explore the fragility of our relationship with nature, but show what that relationship can aspire to be. The Remedies is a lyric, unforgettable collection which offers just the spiritual assuagement its title promises, and shows Towers emerging as a major poetic talent.”
The Floating Man, Picador 2010
Winner of the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize
“Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers’ poems exhibit and almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. She writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of light, or the grace-notes of memory. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.”