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?
