Letters to the Sky "Violet, Before a mirror, I kneel to tend my face Corsage Carousel Stille Disco Now Figure with bindle Virginia Courtauld's Bathroom, Eltham Palace Liberty with Gerry Out of peace of mind And Your Hair Is Devastating The Ruby in the Tree March Display Little Edie On being told you used to be amazing Echo 2 7 Romeo Uniform Away Diorama Fortune Staying in to wash my hair December Chattertoniana She thinks of her dresses Needlepoint Colour Floridaflora Halloween Lane Karaoke in Bow Evelyn and Aurora Triumphans Respite In conversation with myself Aisles En route I suppose Please describe in the space below why you are applying for the role of Museum Assistant at The Wallace Collection The Archeress Elizabeth Bay Sunday I will stay at home and talk on the telephone Dear Camden
Camellia Stafford has the gift of making humility sound like boldness, the perverse demure and the decorative, steely. In its evocation of a muse whose charms Ovid would have coveted, there is the sense of something very highly distilled, just and even sacred. In Letters to the Sky the reader will find poem after poem of remarkable maturity, tenderness and depth - and to boot - knee-trembling pleasure. -- Annie Freud Letters to the Sky is a dressing-up box of nostalgic delights, a sensual exploration of friendship, romance and sweet melancholia with heart-shaped sunglasses on. -- Emily Berry Camellia Stafford's collection has disturbed some of the ways I think about contemporary poetry. The mask of irony is lifted. Universal experiences of anxiety, love, loneliness, are dealt with directly and almost beautified. The language is vivid, colourful. But there is something more, an over-reaching, a leaning toward something less discernible. It's as if she articulates for me the difference between someone who is good at crafting a poem and someone who is a poet. -- Wayne Holloway-Smith Whether drifting through the rococo and pink-noire offerings of museum and city, contemplating the indisputable divinities of art, fashion and love; or effortlessly stepping through the carnage of the afterparty, Camellia Stafford's exquisite first collection offers us poems of great emotional depth and complexity. From spot-on ekphrases, to painstaking jump-cut re-constructions of past events, she extols 'the artistry of looking', in beautiful, generous poems that are both moving, and saturated with a fevered humour. -- Patrick Brandon
Camellia Stafford was born in Warwickshire. She read English Literature and Language at King's College London and has an MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her debut pamphlet another pretty colour, another break for air is published by tall lighthouse. Camellia divides her time between Warwickshire and London.
She is one of the younger London poets now emerging who is worth reading and attending to. -- Todd Swift Eyewear
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