Charlotte Eichler
Poetry
Charlotte Eichler is an award-winning poet based in West Yorkshire, UK. Her first collection, Swimming Between Islands, was published by Carcanet in February 2023 and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize.
Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Carcanet's New Poetries VIII (2021), The Manchester Review, PN Review and The Rialto. Her debut pamphlet, Their Lunar Language, came out with Valley Press in 2018 and was one of the Poetry School's books of the year.
Swimming Between Islands
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2024
Swimming Between Islands has its own distinctive weathers, atmospheres and fauna. Egg collectors, moth trappers, hermits, cuttlefish, pyjama sharks and bloody henry starfish all play a part. This islanded world is the starting point for poems that explore how we try to connect with each other, despite misunderstanding, family silences and unwanted legacies.
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‘Swimming Between Islands is the kind of book that reads you with patient and exquisite attention. Or perhaps it teaches you to read it, which is to say to see and listen and feel your way toward layers of clarity, as when fog lifts from the shore and you see yourself. Which is to say these poems build a world where inner and outer landscapes converse, blur and converge; emotionally astute and ecologically attuned, they change your mind.’
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– Jenny Browne, Seamus Heaney Prize judge
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‘Read Charlotte Eichler’s poems slowly, so that you can really take note of them, because they’re astonishing.’
– Laura Scott, Carcanet
‘The pyrotechnic brilliance of Eichler’s poetry resides in leap-making, a fearless embracing of the unlimited possibilities of form and style [...] There is a diaphanous quality to the poet’s thinking that superimposes a luminous film over her tableaux.’
– Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times
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Their Lunar Language
‘Their Lunar Language infolds named and imaginary, near and far-flung places. It assembles a disquieting array of feminine characters, later bringing in masculine figures of tenderness and fragility. This creates a powerful authorial perspective, not mistakable for any other voice. Brides and cuttlefish, wayward or broken forms of love, woodlands transposable with human manufacture: this is modern pastoral, not nostalgic, and well beyond the ordinary domestic lyric.’
– Anthony Vahni Capildeo
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‘Every time you feel like you know where you're headed with this gorgeous-looking pamphlet something comes along and jabs you in the neck. Whether the little girl with her collection of tortured insects, the brooches of milk teeth, or the unchanging views of Prague in the red View-Master – there’s a kind of spooky dream world here, full of uncomfortable detail, beautifully rendered. More please!’
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‘Their Lunar Language is a timely and discomfiting exploration of our ambivalent interactions with the non-human – and with each other. Eichler exposes our uneasy relationship with the natural world with subtlety and originality. [Hers] is a voice that deserves to be heard in this increasingly fractured world, in which so much is at stake.’
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– Sarah Westcott, review for the Poetry School
Poems
If you'd like to read some of Charlotte's poems online, you can find them in the following places:
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