Our Summer Recommendation, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing is a vivid and incantatory sequence. Set against a backdrop of shifting fields and disappearing habitats, Lapwing explores personal and ecological grief and tells the story of a father and daughter forever at odds. At the heart of the book are the shifting figures of Lapwing and Peet, two creatures whose overlapping narratives echo the double note of the bird’s cry. The father figure of Lapwing reveals a life in slow tumble, disappearing beneath addiction. Running alongside is the searching voice of Peet, a daughter left to understand her father’s vanishing. Bold, exacting, and deeply personal, Copley’s poems call out from empty nests, drained wetlands, and ploughed fields to create a soundscape of endangerment and wonder. Lapwing asks that we consider how, like the bird itself, we must all dissemble to survive.
Hannah Copley is a senior lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine. Her first collection Speculum was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, Blackbox Manifold, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg and other publications and anthologies.