SHORTLISTED FOR THE T.S. ELIOT PRIZE 2021 POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION 'Jack Underwood has developed an utterly clear lyric that rebukes moral obviousness, drives against false certainty. It's as refreshing as it is instructive . . . Underwood has become one of my favorite poets.' Kaveh Akbar Jack Underwood's poetry debut, Happiness (2015), was celebrated for its unconventional and daring tone: 'conversational, arresting . . . weird, singular' (Guardian). Such qualities are on accomplished display in this anticipated new collection, as the poems mature and move on to a wide range of preoccupations, including imminent societal collapse and public unrest; the limits, myths and complexities of masculinity and fatherhood; and uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of fifteen babies or group kissing in Empathy Class. Throughout, incongruous and domestic subjects realign in skewed lyrics and thought experiments, intimately expressed in 'a new language / of the familiar' ('The Landing'). All is presented with a generosity and tenderness that makes the poet so unmistakable - and indispensable for the strange times in which we live. 'I was done in by these poems, but I really lived as I read them; each one holding life and time in a balletics of stress and flow.' Holly Pester

'[A] clever, cosmic, moving and funny parenting physics and poetry adventure . . . It's wonderful' Max Porter via Twitter 'Clear, nimble and dexterous' Ocean Vuong 'It's a magical book. An incantation to be fully present, fully concerned, fully alive' Luke Kennard In this highly original book-length lyric essay, a father and poet reflects on how his daughter's birth at a time of great global uncertainty inspired him to rediscover with fresh urgency the importance of language as a realm of 'intimacy, overlap, hope and trust'. Poetry can uniquely offer an understanding of the world which brings its complexity within reach - yet does not seek to reduce or explain that complexity away. Poetry is a form through which we might reckon with this uncertain world, learn to inhabit our precarious life more fluently and, in turn, offer what we learn to our children. From Joan of Arc to the unfathomable gravity of supermassive black holes, from metaphor to quantum mechanics, Not Even This is a moving, thought-provoking work, full of delights. Jack Underwood is open and attentive to the questions that the world and his daughter continue to present: thrilling, terrifying, fundamental.

'[A] clever, cosmic, moving and funny parenting physics and poetry adventure . . . It's wonderful' Max Porter via Twitter 'Clear, nimble and dexterous' Ocean Vuong 'It's a magical book. An incantation to be fully present, fully concerned, fully alive' Luke Kennard With the birth of his first child, poet Jack Underwood is confronted anew by the panic of living in a time of unparalleled global uncertainty. Even as he holds his baby daughter, the question of how to survive it all seems more fragile and fraught than ever. Addressing both his daughter and his readers, in Not Even This Underwood takes a nimble journey through various encounters with uncertainty, touching on questions of time, poetry, climate change, physics, economics and the serious business of Being Silly. Gradually, he and his daughter show each other what it takes to get by - how attentiveness and language are tools with which we can discover a realm of shared intimacy, hope and trust. Part memoir, part poem, part love letter to a daughter and to all new parents, Not Even This is a delightful and delicate book about how to live now - thrilling, terrifying, fundamental.

Happiness is the long-anticipated debut collection from Jack Underwood. These bright, beguiling poems worry at the world, surreally exploring the 'reservoir of wrongheaded questions' with which love and death confront us. Readers will meet life's strangeness half-way in poems where a childhood horse and recent lover look through a photo album together; where 'sadness is a yacht . . . an anvil dropped from heaven'; fear for a future child is 'a fizz building in a bad grey egg'; a beef steak is 'a question, hung in itself, about blood', and love is someone 'pausing to move a snail somewhere safer in the rain'. In the unpredictable world of these inventive poems, visualisation becomes an empathetic act, a means of sharing the 'fearful and forgotten things' we lie to ourselves about. Happiness is a collection preoccupied with the ephemerality of happiness itself, at the ever-present possibility of its departure, and the ways we try to grasp and keep hold of it. Self-aware and sad, daring and funny, this is an accomplished and memorable debut from a distinct new voice.