The Language of Now
The Language of Now
Anne Caldwell
Paperback
Pre-order now: delivered late February
In The Language of Now, Anne Caldwell crafts prose poems rooted in a northern sense of place – bogs and backstreets, weather and wild margins – while the wider world warms, falters and changes. These pieces thrive on juxtaposition: illness alongside birdsong, childhood memory beside urban grit, the tenderness of connection shadowed by pandemic distance. Caldwell’s lines move with the down-to-earth cadence of prose and the lifted music of poetry, catching small beauties without looking away.
Real and fairytale braid together; memoir slips into myth; humans transform into birds; language is lost, recovered, remade. As the title poem notes, ‘The language of now is short and full of gaps’ – and Caldwell turns those gaps into breathing space, where grief, humour and wonder can coexist. The result is intimate eco-poetics that feels both consoling and bracing, offering quiet resistance as it teaches us how to notice closely, again, right now.
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Imprint: Valley Press
Published: February 2026
ISBN: 9781915606815
Catalogue no: VP0261
Page count: 76
Trim size: 198 x 129 mm
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Praise for The Language of Now:
“The Language of Now is a book of interconnected rooms which explore with passion, humanity, humour and resonant imagery the vulnerability of everything we might have once thought fixed. Caldwell holds the disquiet of nighttime thoughts still enough to see, while the year’s wheel falters on its axis, glaciers melt, bogs grow parched, and bodies fail. These expertly crafted and often deeply personal prose poems will occupy my head for a long time.”
— Helen Ivory
“The Language of Now is an archipelago of prose poems, each a complete, unique island with its own flora and fauna, its vivid topography, its strata of histories of love, connection and conflict, each with its own personality and vulnerability, boglands, moorlands, heartlands. The reader sails through, hushed by the stark beauty of their ordinary magic, while the author reaches tentatively back to find the answers to how we arrived here. Caldwell's writing is elegant, understated and masterfully controlled, the language precise, often plain – but then a phrase will catch you off guard, knock you sideways and almost capsize your boat.”
— Bob Beagrie
About the author
Anne Caldwell is a poet, editor and lecturer with The Open University, based in West Yorkshire. She is the author of six collections, including Alice and the North (Valley Press, 2020) and Neither Here Nor There (SurVision, 2024), winner of a James Tait Prize. She co-edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022) with Oz Hardwick.
Anne’s writing about peatbogs was supported by a DYCP Lottery Award from Arts Council England (2024), including residencies in West Yorkshire and Finland with filmmaker Lewis Landini and dance artist Inari Hulkkonen; she is also part of The Boggarts, an arts collective working to save Walshaw Moor.