Books Archives - Julia Copus || Poet * Children's Writer * Biographer

This Rare Spirit

Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by her contemporaries. She has since been largely neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again. This is the first comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave. Growing up in Bloomsbury, Mew was an intriguing blend of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the agony of an isolated being forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while simultaneously being propelled by her work into the public arena. Fellow poet Julia Copus sensitively reveals how Mew transfigured that very private suffering into an art of universal resonance.

Girlhood

Julia Copus’s exhilarating new collection, Girlhood, is a book of transgressed boundaries and seductive veneers. Restlessly inquisitive, it exposes the shifting power balance between things on the verge of becoming and the forces that threaten to destroy them. Reading these poems, we have the sense of encountering a series of filmic installations arranged by…

Life Support

Life Support is an inspiring choice of verse that offers an escape from the constant chatter of everyday thought and will help readers orient ourselves within the often hectic landscape of daily life. Organised in sections – with each suggesting a different way of looking at the world – these are poems that offer consolation by…

My Bed is an Air Balloon

A beautifully presented picture book with two front covers, the text can be read from front to back and vice versa. The mirror form poem meets in the middle in a stunning centrepiece image as the two children in the story (twins, one in an air balloon, the other a sailing boat) meet in the clouds!

The Shrew that Flew

Badger’s having a hat party, and best friends Harry and Lil are invited. But just as Lil the Shrew is fetching her favourite hat from the washing line, it blows away – too high to rescue. Harry says it’s gone for good, but Lil has other ideas…

The Hog, the Shrew and the Hullabaloo

When a hog and a shrew are best friends, it’s only so long before there’ll be a hullabaloo!

Hog in the Fog

A heart-warming rhyming adventure story about friendship, teamwork and teatime!

The World’s Two Smallest Humans

These finely tuned poems are the fruit of Julia’s upbringing in a musical family, an affinity with the Classics, a fascination with the arc of time, and an unflinching scrutiny of love and personal relationships. The book concludes with a moving arrangement of pieces that explore the author’s experience of IVF: poems written with wry humour and with grace, which celebrate the mysteries of conception alongside the sometimes surreal business of medical intervention. The World’s Two Smallest Humans is an unforgettable read.