Losing Ithaca

Christopher Southgate has been a biochemist, a house-husband, a chaplain in university and mental health contexts, and a teacher of theology. He lives with his wife Sandy on the edge of Dartmoor and works at Exeter University. As a poet he has published four previous collections with Shoestring Press, a verse biography of TS Eliot, and Rain Falling by the River: new and selected poems of the spirit. He has been commended in the National Poetry Competition. This new collection explores territory ranging from grief, depression, and the Passion of Christ to admiration for Garry Sobers, Greta Thunberg, and research into exoplanets.

Of Southgate’s Eliot poem Frances Young wrote of its ‘extraordinary originality and generative power’. William Oxley observed of Southgate’s work that ‘Love and rational curiosity are a rare mix, and rarely successful, but they are here’. R.V. Bailey said of the poems in his last Shoestring, Chasing the Raven, that ‘they're strong stuff, in subject-matter and in conception and in craftsmanship. Southgate is also shrewd in observation and elegant in execution.’ Mark Oakley, writing of Rain Falling by the River, said this: ‘Snow came to mind when I read these poems. Each feels like a crocus pushing itself through a frozen and hardened landscape, born in the first thaws of the spirit that his faith and imagination help transition against all the odds.’