Smith|Doorstop Books

Winner of the 2024 New Poets Prize, judged by Holly Hopkins.An archaeological dig, a visit to an imagined London, puppies that come back from the dead. In Notes on Burials, Jayant Kashyap makes a series of journeys: real, mythological and etymological as he navigates what is lost and what is buried. Kashyap’s poems of love and remembrance reach out to collective losses, human and environmental, in a series of disappearing acts and excavations that take us from broken childhood patio to a snowboarder in an avalanche.

In A Foreign Country, Nigel Pantling takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and for each he serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey though different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.