The Iron Bridge

Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2025

Highly commended in the Forward Prizes 2024Rebecca Hurst's first collection bridges memory and observation, noting the detail of the natural world and our changing relation to it. The book's places are made familiar by walking. It encounters other worlds alive with new and recovered ideas and images – from the folk traditions of her Sussex childhood, to archival encounters with a nineteenth-century nurse-explorer, and her undergraduate training as a Kremlinologist. Her language is deeply rooted, as keenly aware of etymologies as of history. Shaped by myth, history and desire, the poems of

The Iron Bridge are theatrical, fierce, music-infused.