Carrying My Wife

Moniza Alvi left Pakistan for England when a few months old. In The Country at My Shoulder and Bowl of Warm Air, she drew on real and imagined homelands in poems which are 'vivid, witty and imbued with unexpected and delicious glimpses of the surreal - this poet's third country' (Maura Dooley).

In the new poems of Carrying My Wife, her delicately drawn fantasies transform the familiar into strange evocations of the joys and tensions of relationships, of love, intimacy, frustration, jealousy and paranoia, her rich imagery and luxuriant imagination recalling the transformations of Chagall paintings, the dream-visions of Douannier-Rousseau.

In the title-sequence she plays the role of husband to an imaginary wife. Writing from a male or "husband" viewpoint, she is able both to distance herself and to zoom into sensations and difficulties, so that surreal aspects of relationships emerge as well as the humour which might have been blurred in a head-on approach. Her poems do not attempt a male stance, but show another way of looking at oneself.

'These poems are about what is just out of reach, what cannot ever quite be captured but can be imagined with such delicacy that it becomes real' - Helen Dunmore, Observer

'Alvi is a bold surrealist, whose poems open the world up in new, imaginatively absurd ways' - Ruth Padel, Independent

'She writes with a quiet, concentrated simplicity . . . an impressive debut' - Fleur Adcock, PBS Bulletin

'This poetry is deceptively simple, disarmingly truthful, full of a vivid and delicate individuality and jouissance' - Linda France, Poetry Review

As well as the new poems of Carrying My Wife, this book also includes poems from Moniza Alvi's OUP collectionsThe Country at My Shoulder and A Bowl of Warm Air.