Black Country

Berry’s nostalgic, dramatic and dialect-sprinkled poems bring a dream-like West Midlands into English verse

Paul McCartney, Sunday Times

Berry seems, excitingly, to be several poets in one. [She] specializes in the fabulous… This energy lifts her book out of the usual

Fiona Sampson, Independent

Liz Berry is an extraordinary poet: passionate, precise, moving and deeply real. The voice and heat of the Black Country are here, the old tenderness and the complex strands of identity, the humour and the music.

A.L. Kennedy

These are poems of great vitality and charm. Seasoned with the dialect of Liz Berry’s home territory, but with a linguistic and lyric freshness independent of that, they offer nourishment – right bostin fittle, in fact – to readers hungry for the real thing.

Christopher Reid

Ecstatic, quicksilver poems, ablaze with originality, curiosity and a passion for words.

Ruth Padel

Packed with intelligence, sharp observation and a clever innocence... It marks the emergence of a compelling new voice – one that will continue to grow in range and authority

Andrew Motion

I have wondered why the wit, warmth and energy of the West Midlands had no voice amongst the younger English poets. Now it has. Liz Berry is the Black Country’s shining daughter.

Alison Brackenbury

Black Country is an extraordinary debut...rooted in place. When you close the book, you can still see the Black Country in your mind's eye, as if all the poems in it were coming together to form a continuous landscape, a single yet varied view. These poems need to be studied slowly yet there is, as one reads on, a sense of gathering speed, a flightiness, a readiness to soar... She writes, in the best sense, on a wing and a prayer. What marks out this writing is its sparing but assured use of Midlands dialect. This is writing of warmth, maturity and intermittent eroticism. Liz Berry knows her own flight-path, that is for sure.

Kate Kellaway, Observer

What makes Berry an uplifting arrival is her rampant imagination and fully formed conceits

Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph

This is as writer I'm thrilled to discover -- someone who takes pride in the Midlands... turning ordinariness into something direct, tender and beautiful.

Bel Mooney, Daily Mail

Superb... a sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands, scattered with words of dialect that light up the lines like lamps. Expect to hear a great deal more from her in years to come.

Guardian

An utterly new voice, fresh, soaring, thrilling, she is one of those rare poets that make you want to wolf the book down and come back for more… A stunning debut

Jackie Kay, Big Issue

It is unusual for a young poet to have such a developed sense of how questions of voice, identity, place and readership can be resolved in poetry

Paul Batchelor, New Statesman

An amazing debut that signals great things to come in the future from this original, proud poet

Jade Craddock, Nudge

Wonderful…incredible words

Birmingham Mail

Utterly beautiful poems of being in love, being a woman and being free. She is destined to be a star in the cosmos of poetry!

Daljit Nagra, Big Issue

Liz Berry has an ability to bring the Black Country dialect to life with her poems

Diane Davies, Express and Star