Volvelle

An impassioned new collection from the Forward Prize-winning poet Volvelle, Rachael Boast’s fifth poetry collection, highlights the need to remember old forms of connection in an era of fragmentation and technological acceleration. Her title embodies something of this in its elegant, recurring consonants – conjuring love, revolve, evolve, the volvelle a circular paper chart of rotating parts for calculating the cycles of the sun and the moon. There are poems here in conversation with Akhmatova, Cocteau, Lorca, Mirabai, Tennyson and Sufi poetry, while others move in the atmospheres of French, Polish and Spanish arthouse cinema. Boast’s coolly passionate collection also explores the need for a sense of place and belonging, and enquires into the overlap between disability and ‘the body politic’ with a fusing of poetry and reportage on global conflicts and ecocide. With a keen sense of roots and interrelatedness, Volvelle circles the question of what it means to stay human in our age of anxiety, unrest and hyper-materialism.