If You Want Thunder

Ruth Valentine’s tenth collection encompasses the tragedies of the public world – civil-wars in Syria and Sudan, knife crime in North London, the Iraq-Iran war – and our private griefs. At the heart of the book is an extraordinary alphabetical sequence about the Grenfell Tower dead and the society that allowed them to die. It’s a book about the morality of politics and the mortality of us all, a study in remembrance and forgetting, about the indifferent sea with its soft lullabies and cold temptations, time spreading its blankness over everything, and ‘busy humanity with its suitcases and phones, its sudden weeping…’

Author Biography

Ruth Valentine is a poet and activist for refugee and migrant rights. Her poetry collections include The Tide Table (1998), The Announced (2009), On the Saltmarsh (2012), Downpour (2016) and Rubaiyat for the Martyrs of Two Wars (2017). She has also published a history of Horton Hospital, Asylum, Hospital, Haven (1996) and a novel, The Jeweller’s Skin (2013). She lives in Tottenham, London.