The marble orchard

Sandeep Parmar's powerful debut collection, The Marble Orchard, steps boldly through the personal archive of family histories to art, literature and the imagined lives of modern and ancient heroines, from Mina Loy to Ovid's Heroides. Her experiments are set apart by their pure charge of language and textual silences, inherited from the distance between home, identity and memory. "The Marble Orchard is a powerful debut collection. Sandeep Parmar has a fearless and innovative voice, ambitious, searching, richly-lyrical. This is work grounded-in and tempered by wide and informed scrutiny of history, exile, memory and literature. Experience extends metaphor here, and metaphor rehearses and assesses experience. She holds her nerve from start to finish, demonstrating a rare and refreshing seriousness of intent and achievement. These are vital and arresting poems." —Penelope Shuttle "The Marble Orchard is bold, inventive and confident. Each poem makes demands of the reader but offers at once great richness of vocabulary, image and rhythm. There is great range of setting and reference but above all tremendous verbal sensuousness. This is a wonderful debut." —Jeffrey Wainwright.