Longlisted for the 2024 Laurel Prize

East of the Sun, West of the Moon is named after the 1935 jazz standard, and like any great jazz tune this collection is full of improvisation and linguistic innovation, and demands the quality of careful listening.

Many of the poems are written as if from the perspective of a flaneur – registering, reflecting and riffing to wanderings on the streets of Cardiff, Wales’ capital. The natural and the urban environment, immigrant identity and racism, intimacy, spirituality and language: all are captured in the collection’s structure, rhyme and rhythm. Like the heron that swoops over the city’s famous ‘Animal Wall’, these poems look down over the city’s beauty, but also focus in on micro perspectives, animating Cardiff and setting it to life.

If a sense of grief is subtly threaded throughout, one of the gifts of Taz Rahman’s debut collection is a sense of what can, through the power of poetry, be created from trauma.