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Polly Oliver’s writing is powerful and startling, thrumming with ancient energy and the deep, steady rhythms of the earth, sea, and skies. This is poetry that isn’t afraid to turn its face towards the storm; alive and vivid, Edges of Our Days transports us to places where the familiar is both distorted and illuminated. Whether writing about memory and myth, or loss, liminality, and transience, Oliver’s words plunge us into rich, imagistic worlds where falling petals become an explosion, the tiniest shells on the beach are transformed into sites of haunting, and time itself fractures like a fissure through rock. A stunning debut collection from an impressive new voice in poetry. 

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• Catherine Redford, author of The Way the Water Held Me with the Emma Press. 

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From the first poem, the immersive 'Heatwave Cold Swim' Polly Oliver had me holding my breath, wanting more. In  , there is such an acute focus on sensory details with an uncanny ability to zoom into the microscopic and out to the universal. This collection feels as effortless as a dive into cold sea and starlight, but as deep as time itself. A way of experiencing the world both physically and metaphorically - particularly the Gower coast of Polly's home, and her Cornish heritage - with unguarded wonder, and at the same time with an ache for what is lost and hope for what lies ahead. You emerge from reading it changed and tingling; more aware of the forces that have shaped this planet, the myths and legends of our ancestors, both near and far. Here is motherhood and mother earth juxtaposed, ageing and remembering, letting go and holding on ‘but I miss the glitter of magic / around the edges of our days’. This collection, this seam of quartz, is a shining book of poems to be treasured and polished in the re-reading. 

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• Eleanor Holmes author of ‘Moth’, out with Ethel Zine. 

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Here are words which conjure the senses so vibrantly that we forget we are reading print. We live and feel the wild thrill of these poems, finding ourselves shadowed by granite as it rises from the page, swept and salted in seasurge, and gilded by the most ethereal light as Polly Oliver gathers the elements and not only weaves them into poetry, but infuses them with the ancient, the mystical and the human. 

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• Helen Laycock, author of Elemental. 

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The landscapes in Polly Oliver’s poems are rugged, majestic, mythic and sublime, yet they also teem with the minutiae of everyday life—the details that ground us. Attentive to our entanglement with the natural world, she moves deftly between the elemental and the intimate. A beautiful, windswept collection. 

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• Lauren Thomas, award winning writer and co-editor of Black Iris Press. 

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These poems move fluidly between the intimate and the elemental, alert to the textures of both human and nonhuman life. In Edges of Our Days, Oliver creates vivid, mystical soundscapes that resonate beyond the page, sharpening the reader’s sense of being in the world. 

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• CJ Wagstaff, author of ‘COLT’, forthcoming with H’MM Foundation. 

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Polly Oliver's poetry of place journeys the reader through the Mumbles landscape offering 'momentary masterpieces': there's pleasure in the pauses 'between sandstone and sky', exploring the 'thin skin of the heath' delight at the jackdaws as 'chaotic crochets', and even just to linger under that 'whale-jawbone bridge'. Here is a poet who knows her craft and paints with precision and a broad palette. 

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• Katrina Moinet, author of 'Portrait of a Young Girl Falling' with Hedgehog Press. 

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Polly Oliver’s Edges of Our Days is an extraordinary reminder of our place in the physical world of eroded rock and nature beyond our control. These poems do not terrify though – ‘the wordless heartache of the wind’ blowing through them roots the reader to the planet itself, as they share ‘millennia cold on the cheek’. Humanity may be clinging to an unalterable destiny of shifting geological phenomena, but there’s a warmth too – of ‘the joined voices of these familiar strangers’ singing Hey Jude in a choir, or a journey back through a family tree where ‘Pictish voices echo in lines of shared names’. Read these incredible poems and revel in the smallness of your self in the enormity of the Earth’s spirit. 

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• George Sandifer-Smith, author of ‘Empty Trains’ with Broken Sleep. 

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Polly Oliver moves between the liminal and the personal with elegant beauty. From salt-sprayed cliff edges and time-weathered stones to the human experiences of loss and longing, the natural world comes to life in her poems. Oliver's imagery is vivid and precise: gorse on the wind, geode hearts, scattered petals, expansive skies, each detail carrying the form of a fully realised interior life. These are poems that pulse with mythic force, knowing how to embrace pain and wonder in the same breath. Edges of Our Days is a masterful collection—a joy to return to, to survey the horizon from a looming clifftop. 

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• Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad, author of ‘Patchwork Fugue’ with Atomic Bohemian. 

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Edges of Our Days is poetry-as-wind, an animating spirit eddying through the landscapes it encounters. Oliver is concerned with the psychic weather of the places she finds herself in, from the dramatic to the intimate. Like the wind, she “hooks herself / onto bars of light”, catches the ‘wordless heartache’, the ‘whistle-calls’ of sky, land, sea, and flings them onto the page, still quivering. Elsewhere, she pays close attention to the small exigencies of the everyday. Here is the “bright triangle” of a tangerine raincoat, the daffodil’s “hoot of defiance”. There is much to love in the insistence of these poems that here – here! – is the essence of things. Edges of Our Days is airy, quick like a scudding cloud, yet resolves to depth and substance.  

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• Victoria Spires, author of ‘Soi-même’ with Salo Press. 

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Polly Oliver is a poetic powerhouse with a genuine ability to make you pause and reflect whether it be on relationships, nature, identity or pretty much everything else. Her debut collection Edges of Our Days should be on everybody’s reading list this year.

 

• Paul Short, award-nominated writer and editor of The Book Bag. 

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Edges of Our Days by Polly Oliver is one of the most beautifully musical collections that I have read in a very long time. Oliver creates that music with language that manages to be both unusual enough to surprise and concise enough to follow. 

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• Lee Potts, editor of Stone Circle Review and author of ‘We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning’ with Bottlecap Press. 

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The Welsh, Cornish and unfolding emotional landscapes of Polly Oliver’s debut collection have a poetic geology all their own: tactile and sensuous, lyrically inventive and vividly, intensely experienced.  

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• Laura Wainwright, author of The Storm’s Flora with Seren Books. 

 

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The poems in Edges of Our Days are written as if spied from the corner of a careful eye. Polly Oliver looks for, and finds, new ways of navigating an everyday life in an extraordinary universe in this micro and macro of the lived experience. Ageing, relationships, time, space, place and domesticity are all here, but nature itself is the host to this guest, in whose house Oliver is expansively, observantly comfortable.  

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• Tracey Rhys, author of Bathing on the Roof with Parthian Books 

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The poems, rich in place and natural history, remind us that we are all of the same earth, that the very ground beneath us is made of the bones of those who came before. This is a luscious and vividly sensual exploration of time and place, what it means to be alive, and how the here and now is both transient and eternal. 

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• Elizabeth Fevyer, winner of Walk Listen Create Write About Walking competition, 2025. 

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Polly Oliver’s new collection, Edges of Our Days, is rimmed in sea cliffs and driftwood, a shiny necklace of cowrie shells and sea glass, each poem lavished with exquisite language.

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• Regine Ebner, author of Mountains that See in the Dark with Black Bough poetry.

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