‘The Water Engine’ by Ankh Spice


The Water Engine is a truly astonishing debut. Ankh Spice weaves place and pain, trauma and healing, befores and afters together with beautiful new language that will pull you in, send you floating like mist through the sky, and leave you gently adrift in strange yet familiar waters.

“There are tricks so profound, we reel at their grace– Ankh Spice writes in his extraordinary and richly lyrical new book The Water Engine. He is referring to the tides, the skill of the sea, but this gifted and empathic poet could be talking about his own work (if he weren’t so humble) and alluding to a mastery of image, sound, and an uncanny ability to capture the world’s wonders, delights and sorrows on the page. These are spellbinding and immersive poems, brave and bold and big enough to celebrate love, mourn losses, and pay homage to nature in all its manifestations. To read The Water Engine is to look at the winter sun on the incoming tide, and to be dazzled. When the poet writes ‘I too was once a strong magic spell just barely contained inside a skin’ we believe him.”
—Anna Saunders, author of Feverfew & founder of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival

“In this comprehensive and mighty debut collection, The Water Engine, Ankh Spice stands shoulder to shoulder with poets, such as Les Murray, e.e. cummings, Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas in breaking and remaking language to transport the reader to visionary landscapes, mind-altering terrain and as-yet unarticulated, unchartered emotional territories. Many of the poems are elegies for the ‘wounded ape’ in us all and there are truly haunting, if not harrowing, moments in this work, the ‘long voyages back to darkness’ where mental health and life’s adversities are examined forensically, a disorder of the senses that is as disturbing as it is mesmerising. Though we are ‘ghosts in waiting’, heard as ‘a constant howl’ from space, Spice dazzles us with the ‘quartz pricked glitter’ of his vivid and imagery. The Water Engine deserves to be a seminal poetic text of our generation.”
—Matthew M. C. Smith, editor, Black Bough Poetry& author of Origin: 21 Poems


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