Velvel's Violin

Velvel's Violin, a deeply moving and political fifth collection by TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted poet Jacqueline Saphra places us on the shifting ground between past and present. Through its search for missing histories of the Jewish diaspora, the book is a call for empathy and a warning to a world where the legacy of the Holocaust echoes current narratives of prejudice, war, displacement, and migration.
Saphra's precisely-tuned writing ranges through tones of dark humour, lyrical beauty and moments of transcendent joy to find assonance between the turbulence of now and a family history of fragmented stories, irreparable loss and miraculous escapes. Between each poem - forgotten songs, weeping forests, buried violins - sound and silence combine to speak of love, absence and survival.

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher and activist. She is the author of nine plays, five chapbooks and five poetry collections. The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing But Naked Women (The Emma Press) won Best Collaborative Work at The Sabotage Awards. Recent collections from Nine Arches Press are All My Mad Mothers (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize), Dad, Remember You are Dead and One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets. Jacqueline is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches at The Poetry School. Her latest collection, Velvel's Violin (Nine Arches Press, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.