Ship of the Line

‘In this wide-ranging, generous and engaging collection, Penny Boxall brings the past vividly and urgently back to life. She takes us on a wonderfully surprising journey from a taxidermist’s, via the Grand Tour, ice hockey, the Age of Steam, a penny-farthing, a balloon flight, to end up with a deafening beetle buried for years in her grandfather’s ear.’
— Michael Laskey

‘Penny Boxall’s poems are somewhat akin to the glass objects in an antique shop or the attic – each poem holds the light in its own way, and yet when we take the object into our hands it gives us something more, a memory, a story, a fragment of the poet exploring her own experience through these pieces. These are poems to wander about in and to take your time with as your eyes adjust to their particular light.’
— John Siddique

‘The poems in Penny Boxall’s rich and substantial debut are made of hidden fragments of history, things half-glimpsed and mistakes that won’t stay hidden. In her beautifully measured lines she takes us to the edge of the familar, to frontiers, to buildings both exotic and eccentric, and chronicles the people who live there, whose lives are held together by ideas, by “things that we don’t think to see.”’
— Andrew Forster