About the Author

Marianne Burton studied law at Oxford and qualified as a solicitor. She worked in the City specializing in advising Friendly Societies, and as a director on the board of a pharmaceutical company. She has a first class degree in Literature from the Open University and a Creative Writing MA from Royal Holloway where she studied with Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott. In 2010, Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy, who encouraged her to put together her first collection, tutored her at Ty Newydd. Her poems have been widely published in top literary journals including Poetry Wales, Poetry London, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her pamphlet, The Devils' Cut, was a Poetry Book Society choice in 2007. She has won and been placed in a number of competitions including Mslexia, TLS, Edwin Morgan, Bridport, Cardiff International.

Reviews

"Marianne Burton's poems combine grace with intelligence, toughness with delicacy, and thoughtfulness with sensuality. This means her work is full of surprising challenges and reconciliations - all of which bring rich rewards to the reader." - Andrew Motion "Her poems are clever and funny, mystifying the familiar and drawing out surprising double meanings that live with the reader long after the poem has ended. She frequently begins with apparently innocuous observations but by the time the poem closes she has taken the reader on a journey that ends far from where we might have anticipated." - PBS Bulletin on her pamphlet In one poem, Marianne Burton talks of seeing the meninges throbbing through a sleeping baby's fontanelle, a suitable image for a poet whose work throbs intelligently with uneasy but intriguing images - of the body and, often, of night-time. Her debut collection introduces her measured and nettling style to the British poetry scene. - Roddy Lumsden Formally adept and inventive, linguistically charged and scrupulous, emotionally truthful and intelligent, Marianne Burton's stylish poems demand and reward re-reading. - Michael Laskey "This debut collection is remarkable not only for its assurance of technique, but for the poet's ability to make incisive connections with the things in life that somehow exist at the periphery of our vision - that we too often miss, or sometimes simply prefer not to see. This poetry seems to look two ways: on the one hand to be anchored in the tradition and the lyric, while on the other to look forward to the experimental." - Frances Spurrier (Write out Loud) "An ambitious and well realized first collection" - Katy Evans Bush, Poetry London