Volvelle

Volvelle, Rachael Boast's fifth poetry collection, highlights the need to remember old forms of connection in an era of fragmentation and technological acceleration. Her title embodies something of this in its elegant, recurring consonants – conjuring love, revolve, evolve, the volvelle a circular paper chart of rotating parts for calculating the cycles of the sun and the moon.

There are poems here in conversation with Akhmatova, Cocteau, Lorca, Mirabai, Tennyson and Sufi poetry, while others move in the atmospheres of French, Polish and Spanish arthouse cinema. Boast's coolly passionate collection also explores the need for a sense of place and belonging, and enquires into the overlap between disability and 'the body politic' with a fusing of poetry and reportage on global conflicts and ecocide.

With a keen sense of roots and interrelatedness, Volvelle circles the question of what it means to stay human in our age of anxiety, unrest and hyper-materialism. A collection of poems on heritage, the present and the march of progress from the Forward Prize-winning poet. Rachael Boast is the author of five collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Blackbox Manifold, Chicago Review, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, TLS and The Scores. She is co-editor of The Echoing Gallery: Bristol Poets and Art in the City and The Caught Habits of Language: An Entertainment for W.S. Graham for Him Having Reached One Hundred. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Advisor to the Estate of W.S. Graham and a disability advocate. She lives in Suffolk. "Some poets draw you out into the world, and some pull you into their inner world. Rachel Boast's fine new collection, Hotel Raphael, confirms her as that rarity who manages both" -Guardian