Carole Satyamurti is a poet and sociologist, who lives and works in London. For many years she taught at the Tavistock Clinic, where her main academic interest was in the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas to an understanding of the stories people tell about themselves, whether in formal autobiography or in social encounters. She co-edited Acquainted with the Night: psychoanalysis and the poetic imagination (2003). She won the National Poetry Competition in 1986, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2000. Countdown (2011) is her first new collection since Stitching the Dark: New & Selected Poems (2005), which drew on five collections: Broken Moon (1987), Changing the Subject (1990), Striking Distance (1994), Love and Variations (2000), and Stitching the Dark (2005), two of these Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her translation from the Mahabharata is forthcoming from Norton.

Books by Carole Satyamurti:

Other poems on the web by Carole Satyamurti:
"Ourstory"
Two poems

Carole Satyamurti according to Wikipedia.

About Countdown:

"No matter how compelling her themes, with their demands of compassion and political conscience, Satyamurti never loses hold of her main topic: the capacity of language."
—Bernard O’Donoghue

"Carole Satyamurti’s poems look to be stations on a road map of psychological discoveries, sometimes personal, sometimes objective and scientific. Her best poems are not so much confessions as meditations"
—Anne Stevenson

"Her unobtrusive approach is deceptive – these poems have unexpected stings in their tails."
—Penelope Shuttle