ABOUT POETS: KAREN McCARTHY WOOLF - Find out all about Karen McCarthy Woolf via my YouTube playlist of videos about her and via links to her website and other relevant websites. These include poems, interviews and reviews. Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poems reveal a range and craft as they explore themes of loss and grief, migration and displacement. They are sometimes political and are not afraid of emotion. They deal with myth and story and they also find imaginative and innovative ways to write about and explore personal subjects. She says in a Forward Prize interview: “In An Aviary of Small Birds I was concerned with how I might make a very intimate experience universal. In my next book I’m exploring how to take on big, macropolitical issues and render them somehow personally affecting.” McCarthy Woolf’s debut collection An Aviary of Small Birds commemorates a baby son who died in childbirth. It was widely received with enthusiasm and admiration for the way it explores a personal tragedy through shifting and unexpected perspectives. Kate Kellaway in The Guardian calls it a “A beautiful, painful, pitch perfect debut.” An Aviary of Small Birds was a Poetry Book Society Choice and the selector comment called it: “Visceral and tender, the work is also palate-cleansing, the poems fresh and contemporary. The poet draws on the natural world, particularly the fragility and wildness of birds and the weightlessness that answers something in the human soul. This is an exceptional achieved first collection, the poems elegantly controlled, though the feelings cannot be tamed.”