Why Are You Shouting?

This collection thinks about two main things: the efforts we make as individuals to find some form of connection between ourselves, and the efforts we make as a group to connect to the environment we live in. Written in the shadow of the climate crisis and the pandemic years, the poems work hard to find some points of hope and unity against a shared background of disruption and collapse, a background to which we are often wilfully blind. Alongside this is a narrative of personal blindness and self-enchantment, a willingness to allow oneself to be misled in order to have a quiet life. If the collection’ s title suggests that raising one’ s voice is the only way to reach other people, the poems themselves sometimes offer quieter solutions: there is space for humour and kindness, and even a degree of positive thinking about the state we’ re in. The figure of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who was given the gift of prophecy but also condemned to have no one believe her words, stands across the whole collection: her life is a warning, but also an antidote to the deliberate ignorance which can keep people comforted.

James Womack was born in 1979. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry with Carcanet: Misprint (2012), On Trust: A Book of Lies (2017) and Homunculus (2020). He is also an award-winning translator, and has translated widely from Spanish and Russian, including works by Vladimir Mayakovsky (‘ Vladimir Mayakovsky’ and Other Poems, Poetry Book Society Translation Choice Winter 2016), Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Manuel Vilas and Camilo José Cela. He lives in Cambridge.