Katherine Stansfield has made a name for herself both as a wryly witty poet of the everyday seen ‘aslant’ and as a popular novelist of crime and fantasy. Her second poetry collection, We Could Be Anywhere by Now, is pointedly full of poems about placement and displacement. After a childhood on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, she moved to mid Wales, and this book explores relationships between these two places along personal and linguistic lines, as well as notions of insider / outsider in Wales and England, learning languages, and the languages of learning to leave places behind. New horizons beckon: we voyage to Italy, Canada, the United States. Stansfield is never eager to pronounce but always approaches her subjects in an oblique, artful way, carefully avoiding cliché and relishing the strange, the overheard, the marginal, the accidental comedy and tragedy of the everyday.
“Katherine Stansfield writes poems that test language and our place in it, and show how the words that help us anchor ourselves in can suddenly cut us adrift. Perhaps that’s why, whatever her subject, her words are so well-chosen, the tones so deftly-handled. These poems are multi-layered and full of surprising transitions: we never quite feel at home in them, yet wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” – Patrick McGuinness
“Katherine Stansfield’s imagination uses logic and rhythm to push her poems into surprise. She dares to tackle one of the ultimate questions: daring to make a new home. Generously, her poems provide beautiful refuge for her readers.” – Gwyneth Lewis
