Richard Osmond's debut collection Useful Verses follows in the tradition of the best nature writing, being as much about the human world as the natural, the present as the past: Osmond, a professional forager, has a deep knowledge of flora and fauna as they appear in both natural and human history, as they are depicted in both folklore and herbal - but he views them through a wholly contemporary lens. Chamomile is discussed through quantum physics, ants through social media, wood sorrel through online gambling, and mugwort through a traffic cone. In each case, Osmond offers an arresting and new perspective, and makes that hidden world that lives and breathes beside us vividly part of our own. This is a fiercely inventive, darkly witty and brilliantly observed debut from a voice unlike any other you have read before - and as far from any quaint and conservative notion of 'nature poetry' as it is possible to get.

Useful Verses

Literature & Fiction

Osmond, Richard

Poetry

Picador

Richard Osmond won the the Seamus Heaney Prize for his widely praised first collection, Useful Verses. His second, Rock Paper Scissors, presents an extraordinary, collaged response to the poet’s direct experience of the terrorist attack in London on June 3rd, 2017.
Osmond has written a powerful and challenging collection of original poems representing the complex, fragmentary nature of traumatic experience. Interleaved with these are translated excerpts of two very different texts: the Anglo Saxon epic poem Beowulf, and the Qur'an. Osmond's translations from the Qur'an, in contrast to the stereotype of the Qur'an as a monolithic book full of judgement and proscription, focus on its vivid lyricism and the surprisingly riddling nature of its philosophy. In this unexpected context, the visceral and frightening excerpts from Beowulf echo with unnervingly modern resonances.
Rock, Paper, Scissors takes a bold look at the problems of interpretation of texts and of events: in taking every opportunity to keep the complexity of his difficult subject intact, and in his refusal to simplify some of the most urgent questions of the age, Osmond has written a book of compelling importance.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Shill

HappenStance

Variant Air

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Books by Osmond, Richard