Icarus on Earth

Jane Griffiths's second collection re-imagines lives. Her poems are populated by people ranging from the invented to the mythological to the wholly real. Somewhere in between, the title-sequence recreates the life of Icarus as it might have been had he been born in modern suburban England. Through the voices of his father, his mother, his mildly inept biographer, and the girl-next-door, it explores the gap between desire and reality, and the consequences of trying to get across it. Icarus stands for the people in many of the poems, passionately concerned to test the limits of what is possible in many different kinds of flight, both literal and metaphorical. It is a book of elegies for lives not lived as well as actual lives.