When knowledge is ours at the tap of a key, what is it we’re accumulating, and is it at the expense of another, more intuitive, kind of knowing? The word ‘fool’ derives from the Latin follis, one of whose meanings is ‘empty-headed person’. We can’t imagine such mindlessness but might it be possible that by ‘unknowing’ a thing we can start to see it properly? There’s a lot the fool doesn’t know – otherwise they wouldn’t be a fool. But can anyone be trusted to know anything? What can we be trusted to know? A certain apprehension runs through these poems; a low-level hum of discordance between inner and outer worlds, between the sceptical and the wondering mind. Ideas of belief and objective truth play out in various ways, often through lone figures, thinking aloud in a wilful kind of performance of being. Fool is Greta Stoddart’s fourth collection. Her third collection Alive Alive O was published by Bloodaxe in 2015.

"Greta Stoddart sets transience against endurance: the certainty of human mortality against the mysteries of forbearance." - Chair of Judges, Roehampton Poetry Prize, on Alive Alive O

"Colloquial, faintly unruly, the poems travel light on adventures of consciousness, channelling the energies of a big, agnostic imagination into new forms." - Poetry Review, on Alive Alive O

"When not confronting life and death as we most vividly encounter them, Stoddart’s poems suggest the ways in which our mortality is ever-present in daily life… Alive Alive O is a compelling book, defiant in the face of life’s losses." - Times Literary Supplement