Earlier

'If each life is a world, what is a world of billions of lives? Sweeping through evolutionary time, through the passage of ages, Rosanna Licari's Earlier looks back, applies its forensic gaze to an insistent, pervasive history of births and creations, human and other. Weaving threads and connections, Licari's poems investigate rich and diverse beginnings, awakenings, and endings too, celebrating lush, thriving, irrepressible life, both individual and collective. Thoughtful, curious, broad ranging, at times wondering, at times biographical, Earlier is an archaeology of poems to unearth and relish.' - David Adès, poet, host of Poets' Corner podcast series 'Rosanna Licari's collection Earlier is an elegant feast that pulses and throbs with vivid life. Perhaps the most powerful theme of the collection is that of hope, of survival and continuance in the face of uncontrollable forces, their scouring, purging power leaving their survivors naked as they step from burning rubble into the unknown future, bearing a seed of continuance and new life. Earlier's eloquent and discerning lyrical narratives are poems for now, with their wisdom and stoicism, their calm beauty in the eye of today's calamitous uncertainty.' - Melissa Ashley, author of The Birdman's Wife and The Bee and the Orange Tree 'Rosanna Licari's Earlier is a "bristling corpus" of extraordinary poetry, deeply rooted in intersectional environmentalism. There are blessings, valedictions and "molten metal-laced" poems of witness, devastation and ardour in this collection, exploring in diverse ways metaphysics, metamorphosis, evolution, new histories and ekphrasis. Superb, intimate and breathtaking in their expression of an ecopoetic community, Earlier is a wonderland of poems, where "The seed forms and anticipates /…