Shrines of Upper Austria

Overview

Longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award from the Society of Authors Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize Winner of the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection A Poetry Book Society Spring 2018 Recommendation? Wandering in central Europe, a traveller observes and records a landscape of lakes, folk culture and uneasy histories. Phoebe Power's Shrines of Upper Austria gathers numerous stories and perspectives, such as the fragmented narrative of an Austrian woman who married a British soldier after the Second World War, and the voices of schoolchildren and immigrants. Strange discoveries are made: a grave for two dead goats; a lantern procession on the night of Epiphany; a baby abandoned by a river; a homemade frog-puppet. The poems are a collage of stories and histories, set in a variety of forms and registers. They are attentive to local detail, rich in the names of people and places—Marija, Omegepta, Eck 4 and the Loser Mountain. Mixing poetry and prose, image and narrative, German and English, Power's poems are a celebration of creativity in unlikely places. Against a disquieting backdrop of mild winters and memories of snow, they invite us to question what it means to feel at once a stranger and at home.

Reviews

"Phoebe Power, in this accomplished, formally restless debut collection, yokes together some very surprising things: political musings, quasi-comic consumerist dilemmas, fascinated and bemused observations of Austrian custom, transcribed vocal fragments, family history, even – at one point – a murder mystery. You feel there is nothing her acute poetic eye cannot absorb. All this incorrigible plurality is united by an intelligence at once satirical and scrupulous, probing and tender. Hers is surely one of the freshest new voices to emerge in years." —Caitríona O'Reilly

Author Biography

Phoebe Power was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1993. After becoming a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2009, she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2012 and a Northern Writers' Award in 2014. A live version of her pamphlet, Harp Duet (Eyewear, 2016) was recently performed with electronic music. Phoebe studied English at the University of Cambridge, and spent some months living and working in Austria before moving to York in 2016.