Sweet Anaesthetist

Jay Whittaker’s debut collection, Wristwatch, won the 2018 Saltire prize for Poetry Book of the Year. In this eagerly awaited follow-up, Jay explores themes of origin, asking what shapes us most: our biological heritage or the societies we find ourselves born into?

Her work draws deeply from the landscapes of the Hebrides and East Lothian, from the natural world in general. Yet, often, it returns to the fleshly bodies we inhabit and through which we experience everything - as in her debut, in Sweet Anaesthetist Jay discusses the frailty of the body and the task of living with cancer - but she also turns outwards, to beings encountered and too easily overlooked in the rush of the day-to-day: friends, acquaintances, the smallest creatures with which we share our days.

Culminating in the prose poetry sequence, ‘Egg Case’, Sweet Anaesthetist is a vibrant, transfixing plunge into the stuff of life itself.