In the Plague Year: Poems

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In the Plague Year is a book about living through the Covid-9 pandemic, when a coronavirus and its variants swept around the globe. In a remarkable suite of poems, William New reveals how, from March 2020 to March 2021, people coped with the threat. This is a book about love and death, laughter and loss, the price of isolation, and the cost of staying alive.

This pandemic was no minor unease, and this book is no workaday diary: it’s a powerful record of people’s lives as a new pandemic vocabulary became the idiom of the day. In these poems, people prove to be both dismissive and empathetic; officials react both creatively and slowly; institutions adapt or fail; not everyone survives.

Other writers have recorded the impact of plague on human history-think of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, or Samuel Pepys’s account of the Black Death in London, or Albert Camus’ tale of cholera in The Plague: ‘But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life after all.’

In the Plague Year contrasts those who (in Camus’s terms) see pestilence as ‘a bogey of the mind’ and those who see that ‘there are sick people and they need curing.’ New’s poems are fresh, witty, serious, and sensitive a powerful personal documentary that testifies to the strength of community.