Inbetween Days
Inbetween Days
Antony Dunn
Hardback (with dust jacket)
Pre-order now: for delivery October 2026
Antony Dunn’s Inbetween Days inhabits the charged territory between childhood and parenthood: a place of intense pleasure, pressure, responsibility and joy.
In poems that call and respond to his previous collection, Take This One to Bed, Dunn traces lines of inheritance and succession – from not-quite-grandfather to ‘hard-born, hard-won’ son, from poet to poet, from younger selves to older ones. These are poems of lives entangled with other lives, of sorrow accumulated and love stubbornly renewed, finding refuge in the most surprising places.
Poised between celebration and lament, between the dead and the living, Inbetween Days is an urgent, intimate and vividly alive collection, written – after a decade’s distraction – during a year-long residency in the poet’s own back-garden shed.
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Imprint: Valley Press
Published: October 2026
ISBN: 9781915606907
Catalogue no: VP0277
Page count: 96
Trim size: 216 x 140 mm
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Praise for Inbetween Days:
‘A collection I didn't know I'd been thirsting for – absolutely gorgeous and a joy to read, keenly tuned to all our loves, guilts and griefs, punctuated by an aviary of strange winged prayers and written with a craft so deep and fluent that the whole collection is as musical and supple as wren-song.’
— Fiona Benson
‘This is a wonderful collection, measured and lucid, economical and unclouded, full of poems that can make light work of heavy weather, often walking the microtonal terrain between childhood and parenthood – the borderlands of letting go – to cast a wry, level eye over proceedings, quietly revelatory and truthful.’
— Paul Farley
‘The movements of a life, childhood, midlife, death and departure, move through these pages and yet there is always the poem, here to help us pause, to hold time, to offer space for contemplation and ultimately to change us with their quiet beauty. A remarkable and moving new collection.’
— Andrew McMillan
‘An explosive quiet permeates these records of immediate and expansive scope where nothing is mere quandary or felicity but is always brokered with its reverse face, its other engagements yet to be made, which make this collection so enjoyably philosophical yet worldly wise.’
— Daljit Nagra
About the author
Antony Dunn has previously published four collections of poems; Pilots and Navigators (Oxford University Press), Flying Fish (Carcanet OxfordPoets), Bugs (Carcanet OxfordPoets) and Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). He edited and introduced Ex Libris, the posthumous collection of poems by David Hughes (Valley Press).
He is a regular tutor for The Poetry School, has taught many times for the Arvon Foundation and has worked on a number of translation projects with poets from Holland, Hungary, Israel/Palestine and China.
Antony has been Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and the People Powered Press. Until 2018 he was Artistic Director of the Bridlington Poetry Festival. He lives in Leeds.