Following the success of her T. S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over and award-winning translation of the medieval Pearl, Jane Draycott returns with her fourth collection of poems, The Occupant. With a rhythmic subtlety and metrical poise that have become hallmarks of her verse, Draycott hints at the existence of a world of dreamlike clarity underneath our own. In the National Gallery a gardener cuts away the flower from a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; in an abandoned sanatorium a grand piano dreams of the voices and music of days past, 'rose-spotted paintwork peeling softly, half-moon fanlights rising, sinking'. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem, 'The Occupant', draws on scenes proposed but left unwritten in Martinus Nijhoff's Awater. In the stifling summer air, Draycott's occupant trawls the streets of an unnamed city whose 'dead lanes keep their silence', where 'the frail expire and pale dogs whimper', as its police post notices: 'Missing: Have you seen this wind?'



Jane Draycott was born in London and studied at King's College London and Bristol University.

Her first full collection, Prince Rupert's Drop (1999), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. In 2002 she received the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, the year of her second collection The Night Tree, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her third collection, Over, was nominated for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2011 Carcanet published her translation of the fourteenth-century Pearl, winner of a Stephen Spender Prize for Translation.