Who Goes There?
‘The lookout hails
into the weather
We hear no words
but catch his meaning’
Halt! Who Goes There? Penny Boxall’s second collection – following the award-winning Ship of the Line – throws light on the mysterious strangers we glimpse, and turns that same light on ourselves. From shadows lost to history to forgotten possessions and our own past identities, these poems consider questions of selfhood and the ways in which we can be peripheral in our own lives.
‘The lookout hails
into the weather
We hear no words
but catch his meaning’
Halt! Who Goes There? Penny Boxall’s second collection – following the award-winning Ship of the Line – throws light on the mysterious strangers we glimpse, and turns that same light on ourselves. From shadows lost to history to forgotten possessions and our own past identities, these poems consider questions of selfhood and the ways in which we can be peripheral in our own lives.
‘The lookout hails
into the weather
We hear no words
but catch his meaning’
Halt! Who Goes There? Penny Boxall’s second collection – following the award-winning Ship of the Line – throws light on the mysterious strangers we glimpse, and turns that same light on ourselves. From shadows lost to history to forgotten possessions and our own past identities, these poems consider questions of selfhood and the ways in which we can be peripheral in our own lives.
Praise for Who Goes There?
'Penny Boxall is a poet of the particular and strange, and her work in Who Goes There? often takes oddities as a launch pad – a wartime stunt by the secret services, or a Ravensburger jigsaw spilling out across a road – before alighting on further peculiarities through her delightfully finicky manipulation of thought and language... This collection is all nipped livery and briskness and comes with the lasting sting of the true poet. It will be fascinating to see where Penny Boxall goes next.'
– Andrew Neilson, Magma
About the Author
Penny Boxall was born in 1987. Her debut collection of poetry, Ship of the Line, was first published in 2014 and relaunched in a new edition by Valley Press in 2018, alongside her second collection Who Goes There?
She won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the Elmet Trust Competition, and holds an MA with distinction in Creative Writing (Poetry) from UEA. In 2017, she became writer-in-residence at Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire and a Hawthornden Fellow. Her poem 'A wedding list' won the Mslexia/PBS Women's Poetry Competition 2018.
Vital Statistics
Imprint: Valley Press
Edition: First (September 2018)
Paperback ISBN: 9781912436064
Catalogue number: VP0126
Page count: 48
Trim size: 203x133mm
