Fool

When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing?

The word ’fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ’empty-headed person’. Such mindlessness is not quite imaginable, but perhaps it is possible that by unknowing a thing we can start to see it differently. There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know - otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool - but can anyone be trusted to know anything?

A low-level hum of discordance runs through these poems: between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, fools maybe, thinking aloud, continually distracted by the necessary performance of being.

Already an established and respected name in the world of poetry and drama, Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015. In 2023, Greta Stoddart won a Cholmondeley Award, a prize which recognises a poet’s body of work.

Greta Stoddart was born in 1966 in Oxfordshire. She grew up in Belgium and Oxford before going on to study drama at Manchester University, then at the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She co-founded the theatre company Brouhaha in London, touring the UK and Europe. She has lived in Devon since 2007. Her first collection, At Home in the Dark (Anvil Press, 2001), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2001 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her second, Salvation Jane (Anvil, 2008), was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Poetry Award. In 2007 she was nominated by Mslexia as one of the best ten contemporary women poets in the UK. Her poem ’Deep Sea Diver’ was shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her third collection, Alive Alive O (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize. Her half-hour radio drama Who’s There?, first broadcast on Radio 4’s The Echo Chamber in 2017, was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. Her fourth collection, Fool, is published by Bloodaxe in 2022.