Fantastic Voyage

By Amanda Dalton

In this tender and wryly humorous poetry collection, a child travels down her own oesophagus, a woman joins a search party to look for herself, one grief-stricken soul descends into a watery underworld whilst another experiences love as demonic possession…. 

In Fantastic Voyage, Amanda Dalton takes us on journeys into our hidden and ghostly selves, our insides and our ‘other’, exploring the myriad ways in which the human body gives voice to unspeakable truths. These poems put us in and alongside bodies that are ill, out of control and inhabited - our dark innards as harbingers of secrets and fears, the gut as fortune-teller and home to ghosts. 

Taking inspiration from sources as disparate as human anatomy and classic 1960s science fiction, this collection charts a deeply personal voyage through grief and loss. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781780377124

Book preview

Cover: Fantastic Voyage by Amanda Dalton

AMANDA DALTON

Fantastic Voyage

A child travels down her own oesophagus, a woman joins a search party to look for herself, one grief-stricken soul descends into a watery underworld whilst another experiences love as demonic possession … By turns wryly humorous, tender and heartbroken, Fantastic Voyage takes us on journeys into our hidden and ghostly selves, our insides and our ‘other’, exploring the myriad ways in which the human body gives voice to unspeakable truths. These poems put us in and alongside bodies that are ill, out of control and inhabited – our dark innards as harbingers of secrets and fears, the gut as fortune-teller and home to ghosts.

The book’s central long poem, Notes on Water – a meditation on water – charts a deeply personal voyage through grief and loss. Two contrasting voices attempt to navigate a devastated world as both a corporeal and visceral experience, one grounded, the other hallucinatory. In other dreamlike experiences, poems glimpse absent bodies as apparitions, doppelgängers and hauntings, and our visible selves as beings we cannot always recognise. Readers can listen to the original BBC Radio 3 version of Notes on Water using a QR code printed in the book.

‘Here is a magnificent poem of poems: a surging, truth-bound voyage that offers no easy purpose, acceptance, or ending.’ – David Morley, The Poetry Review, on Notes on Water

Cover art: Entering a gland cave (1924) by Arthur Schmitson

www.fritz-kahn.com

(see Acknowledgements page for full details)

Amanda Dalton is a poet and playwright. Her first book-length collection, How to Disappear (Bloodaxe Books 1999), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and she was chosen as a Next Generation Poet in 2004. Her second collection, Stray, was published by Bloodaxe in 2012. In 2021 Arc published her experimental chapbook, 30 Poems in 30 Days and, in 2022, Smith | Doorstop published a pamphlet of two long poems, Notes on Water. A version of Notes on Water was re-created for two voices and soundscape for BBC Radio 3’s Between the Ears. Her third full-length collection, Fantastic Voyage (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), includes the radio version of Notes on Water together with a QR code enabling readers to listen to that recording.

Amanda writes extensively for BBC Radio 4 and 3 including original drama, poetry-dramas, classic adaptations, re-imaginings of film, and lyric essays. Her theatre writing includes commissions with Manchester’s Royal Exchange, Sheffield Theatres and Keswick’s Theatre By The Lake.

Freelance since 2017, much of her career has been focused on teaching, mentoring and the curation and artistic leadership of innovative cross art-form projects, often in collaboration with other artists and communities. Her website is https://www.amandadalton.co.uk

She lives in Hebden Bridge.

AMANDA DALTON

FANTASTIC

VOYAGE

Logo: Bloodaxe Books