A Pair of Three

Claire Crowther's fifth collection, A Pair of Three, is her most personal yet, a story of marriage to a widower. It explores a trio, wife, husband and first wife, in a love story that is moving, uplifting, often funny but rarely told. The emotional power of lyric, the narrative of ballad and the drama of modernist poems are all displayed in this distinctive sequence. Claire Crowther's previous collection, Solar Cruise, was widely praised and awarded a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her first collection, Stretch of Closures, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize. She is Deputy Editor of Long Poem Magazine, teaches creative writing at Oxford University, and lives in Somerset. Reviews of Solar Cruise "Claire Crowther mosaics together poetic and scientific discourse to create new adventures in thought ... These poems perpetually test the ability of science language to infiltrate the lyric, to begin to make another kind of sense to that which hard science requires. ... There's a problem here - a gap in public understanding - and in that void, Crowther's poems dance and glow. ... Crowther's poems are fizzily cerebral, wordplay-avid, both sensuous and ratiocinative: 'I write crosswise. I experiment with words'." -Vidyan Ravinthiran "This outstanding collection reads as a profound love poem, a generous gift from an inquisitive poet to her bright and devoted physicist partner in a lucid relationship filled with creativity, mutual appreciation and respect. It is a brilliant journey that takes the reader to unexpected and exhilarating places." -Leo Boix