Portraits of Drowning

A beguilling collection of poetry from the 2023 winner of the Thomas Shapcott Prize for Poetry

I was thinking of wild things and what we make of them.

Portraits of Drowning is lyric poetry at its best. In these rich and varied poems, Madeleine Dale reveals water as the lifeblood of our ecosystems but also our imaginations, energising romance and tragedy, troubling history and myth. Sustaining eye and ear, heart and mind, this is a debut of exquisite skill.