Alice Kavounas
Shearsman Titles
Ornament of Asia
About the author
Alice Kavounas lives on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, following an intensely urban life in NY and London. She is a tutor with the Poetry School, London, and married to British historian Frederick Taylor.
Born in Manhattan to Greek parents, Alice read English Literature at Vassar.
On graduation, she moved to London to begin, completely by chance, a career
as an advertising copywriter at JWT in Berkeley Square. She confesses to
never having heard a nightingale sing. But she was pleased to see that several
poets held down a day job there, and it was in London that her own poems
began to take flight.
Over the years, some sixty of her poems have appeared in literary journals
and anthologies, including Out of Fashion (selected by Carol Ann Duffy, Faber),
Poems and Reading for Funerals (selected by Julia Watson, Penguin), Acumen,
New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly, London Magazine,
LRB, Magma, PN Review, TLS, as well as broadcast on the BBC and ABC. Her short stories have been published
in Granta and London Magazine.
"Ornament of Asia speaks with disciplined eloquence of familiar territory: the poet's early years in Manhattan, her current home in Cornwall, her father's native Greece." (Natalie Pollard, TLS)
Reviews of her first collection, The Invited (Sinclair-Stevenson), included praise by Alan Brownjohn (The Sunday Times) for her "brilliant lyrical style" and "sharp eye and unfussy lyricism" (William Scammell, The Independent). Helen Dunmore (The Observer): "There are no comfortable answers in these tense, demanding poems". John Lucas (Stand): "I also hope that some enlightened publisher can be found for Kavounas's next book. If it's anything like The Invited it will be well worth reading”.
Ornament of Asia is her second full collection.
"Contemporary poetry, in Kavounas's version of it, does not offer a refuge
from historical brutalities, but demands a close engagement with questions
of exile, identity and heritage." (TLS)