Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers' poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man , Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory. Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.
Katharine Towers was born in London in 1961 and read Modern Languages at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She has an MA in Writing from Newcastle University. Her pamphlet 'Slow Time' was published by Mews Press in 2005 and her poems have appeared in publications including Mslexia and The North. She lives in the Peak District with her husband and two daughters.
