The Seed Drill

This is a remarkable collection-tender, devastating-with a rare precision and skill in its making. The more I read these vivid, unflinching poems the more threads appeared within and between them, sending me back and back to trace them. These are poems of metaphysical ambition, but always hard-won, always returning to the physical, whatever the cost. The Seed Drill is-to borrow one of its lines-"a sinuous declaration of love," and an extraordinary one at that.-Michael Symmons Roberts, author of eight collections, including Drysalter and RansomIn The Seed Drill, we experience the lyrical treatment of a life in waiting, a life in stillness. These poems wrestle with purpose and function, our world's expectations, and the perceptions of brokenness, while inviting readers to deep contemplation. As the poems navigate presence and absence, fulfilment and emptiness, the found and the lost, birth and death, they do not, in fact, run from anything, but sit in reflective stillness. They wait. And they invite me to do the same.-Jacob Stratman, author of What I Have I Offer With Two HandsRarely have remote historical events felt so intimately lived. Rarely have private jolts of self-understanding condensed so beautifully in timeless symbol. Egerton's is sturdy verse: revealing and revelatory. A stunning debut.-Steven Toussaint, author of Lay StudiesThe quietly layered imagery in The Seed Drill lives at the intersection of humor and despair. Here we begin with a speaker who meditates on his doctor's war similes for sperm, who flashes back to playing at war as a child, and who thinks of his own infertility in terms of historical rulers and biblical figures, not because he has delusions of grandeur, but because the experience holds that much emotional weight. Egerton explores the word "seed" in terms of offspring and also in other uses-what we plant, the money we use to begin a project-and he wades right into social stigmas, historical research, family memories, and faith to bring us this raw, moving, necessary work.-Katie Manning, author of Tasty Otherand Hereverent