Cover image by Ben Nason

“Lucy Wadham’s Fold is wonderful – cool and sharp and charming at the same time. Here are poems of domestic life keenly and generously observed: Wadham has an expert eye for the ramifying detail. Her work is celebratory and elegiac at the same time, taking ‘spots of time’ and scraping meaning from the incidental. These are poems of a rare sensibility.”

Nick Laird, chair of the judging panel

“Observant and imaginative, these poems stake out the world of experience and feelings with enough confidence to make the reader believe the poet must have been writing them for twenty years, not five. They have a wonderful sense of drama, and above all know how to begin and how to stop. The best poems here have a sharpness and brilliance that transcends the private material that can sometimes be powerful for the writer but not for anyone else. Rich in a sympathetic sensibility, they are outward-looking as well as inwardly analytical. And they manage to be funny as well.”

John Fuller