Erica McAlpine is Associate Professor of English at Oxford and the A. C. Cooper Fellow in English at St Edmund Hall. Her new poetry collection, Small Pointed Things, is now available from Carcanet Press. The Poet’s Mistake appeared with Princeton University Press in 2020, and her first collection, The Country Gambler, was published by Shearsman Books in 2016.

Praise for Small Pointed Things…

Traditional form is the keystone for Erica McAlpine, and in Small Pointed Things she brings her scrupulous musicality to bear on the natural world, retellings of Ovid and “the point of no return”. She’s particularly good at turning scenes from nature and the quotidian into something at times almost parable-like, ruminative while never abandoning the physical or concrete realm.’ —Declan Ryan, The Irish Times

Music also drives Erica McAlpine’s Small Pointed Things: in her case, the tradition of intricate slyly-rhyming American verse that runs from Robert Frost to Kay Ryan. Insects, animals and plants are often the focus…. [She] matches clever rhyme with ingenious images — removing cobwebs is like “combing through a baby’s hair”, a tree stripped of its branches like “a finished lollipop”. —Graeme Richardson, The Times

As the title of McAlpine’s new Carcanet collection tells us, Small, Pointed Things are revealed in various poses and guises (bats, swallows, a scorpion, etc) but the poems themselves can sometimes be identified as “pointed”, logical but equally critical of certainty, indicating unexpected directions that can hurt complacency and disrupt the wish for the order represented by poetry’s form and pattern. —Carol Rumens, The Guardian

Small Pointed Things is a sheer delight. These are deft, intelligent and surprising poems… The rhymes fall naturally, even unobtrusively; and the endings have a falling note or sly reversal that seems like Louis MacNeice or Stevie Smith. —Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

Erica McAlpine offers us elegant, expertly crafted poems written mainly in rhyming stanzas that often reveal a quirky wisdom gleaned from reflections on marriage and motherhood… Small Pointed Things is an artistic triumph. —Colin Carberry, The High Window

Praise for The Poet’s Mistake…

“The Poet’s Mistake by Erica McAlpine is a winning catalogue of flaws and fuck-ups that includes Robert Browning thinking a ‘twat’ was an item of dress for a nun.” —Paul Muldoon, TLS Books of the Year

[McAlpine’s] book is more than a catalogue of howlers; its aim is not to shame poets for their errors but to question critics’ attempts to explain away those errors at all costs…The wager here is that an honest assessment of a poet’s actual achievement—mistakes and all—means more than another facile demonstration of artistic perfection. Whether or not this wins more converts to the cause of poetry, it might at least allow those who are already converted a less mystified relationship to their idols.” —Evan Kindley, The New York Review of Books.

"Almost every great poet made mistakes. McAlpine sees something telling in these errors: even if they are not volitional, they're almost always portals of discovery.” —Graeme Richardson, The Times Literary Supplement

“McAlpine displays a sensitive ear, a command of poetic history, and a critical intelligence that makes fine distinctions clear and meaningful. The Poet’s Mistake is a model of good academic criticism."—Anthony Domestico, Commonweal Magazine

“[S]he writes in a cogent and jargon-free prose, her sentences mostly uncluttered and approachable… [This book] has a useful role to play, albeit in the unlikely cause of bringing poets, or at least their most complaisant enablers, down a peg or two.” —Declan Ryan, Los Angeles Review of Books.

“McAlpine’s point is that accuracy is as important in poetry as in fiction, that intentionality, however difficult that might be to determine, is a factor one must consider, and that unconscious mistakes differ from naïve errors. . . . This study is convincingly argued, delightfully written, fascinating in its examples, and well worth a careful read.”—Choice Reviews

Praise for The Country Gambler…

"The poems in The Country Gambler, McAlpine's first collection, are intelligent and poised. They teach and delight." —Beverley Bie Brahic, The Times Literary Supplement

"A powerful intelligence animates this work, with a maturity of perspective striking in a younger poet. There is something of Marianne Moore in her scrupulously observed animals, her dexterities . . . These poems evoke animals, plants, erotic predicaments, seasonal shifts of inner and outer weather, impending motherhood; most of all, they conjure a sensibility—alert, discriminating, sympathetic, sometimes mordant, profoundly responsive, classically romantic, romantically classical."   —Maureen McLane, Vela Magazine

 "Sensitive and uplifting...[these poems] represent a significant beginning of a serious poetic talent."   --Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence

"A work of significant technical achievement." --Edward Doegar, Poetry London