The Crash Wake and other poems

by Owen Lowery

Overview

The Poetry Book Society Winter Wild Card 2021. In February 2020, ventilated tetraplegic poet Owen Lowery and his wife, Jayne, were travelling to Scotland when their vehicle aquaplaned, spun round on the motorway, hit a barrier, flipped over the barrier and rolled over several times, before coming to rest on its side in a field. Having barely survived, Lowery emerged into a world transformed by the coronavirus, one in which life and death had moved closer. During his months of recovery from three brain bleeds, a shattered right arm, multiple seizures, and pulmonary bleeding, Lowery returned to writing poems, many of which address the strangeness, the disorientation, of his situation and that of the world in general. Lowery wrote these poems amidst reports of Government and health initiatives that suggested potential utilitarian sacrifices of 'the vulnerable.' Completed shortly before his death in May 2021, the fear and loss of the vulnerable and the voiceless haunt many of the poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781800171763
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	01/13/2022
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Owen Lowery was born in 1968. A British Judo Champion while still at school, he toured the UK and Europe competing and demonstrating. Before he could go to University he suffered a spinal injury while showing his skill for charity. He has since been tetraplegic. He gained a BA from the Open University, an MA in Military History from the University of Chester, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Bolton. He completed a PhD for Bolton joining creative and scholarly work relating to his own experience of living under perpetual threat of death to the World War II poet Keith Douglas.