Witness is more than a journey through the observed life of a poet, it is the world felt and experienced through the myriad sources that pour in to our lives. Social Media, TV programs, newspapers, overheard conversation... The world is a cipher we all understand in our own, particular way. In this collection the poems bear witness, and in reading them, the reader does too.

 

David J. Costello is a winner of the Welsh International Poetry Competition and has been a prize winner in the Troubadour International Poetry Competition and Grist Poetry Prize, amongst others. He is widely published and anthologised. His first full collection, Heft, (Red Squirrel Press, 2020) won 3rd Prize in the 2020 Poetry Book Awards for Best Collection.

 

On No Need For Candles 

 

‘The opening poems of illness and loss are stark, plain and moving. A later poem mentions “the flung shape that always returns”—these poems explore their own limits and always returns to the human.’

 

—Andrew McMillan

 

‘Costello has a strong feeling for the terse motive phrase: for a dying man, he writes, “a nurse arrives to usher in December”. Ranging from moths, the moon, Welsh folklore to the recall of departed family members, these poems are tender and precise.’

 

—Gill McEvoy

 

On Heft

 

‘David Costello’s poetry is especially adept at evoking the passing of time. Throughout this collection, he portrays the ambiguities and ambivalences of relationships between the individual and the collective, the human and the natural, the historical and the present, moving his readers in every poem.’

 

—Matthew Stewart

 

‘Never mind The Book of Common Prayer, this collection should be gifted to everyone.’

 

—Sally Spedding

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