Poetry / poems by individual poets

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Book Synopsis"These poems come right up to the reader, go through his pockets, check the seams and hems of his personality, his essence, his baggage, amiably but determinedly shaking him down.""A very lyrical poet." Remco Ekkers.Introduction by Jeffrey Wainwright.Translated by Willem Groenewgen.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.Trade Review"A very lyrical poet." Remco Ekkers 'Leeuwarder Courant'

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Book SynopsisIn Woman Song, Jean Goulbourne articulates the grief, hopes and unquenchable spirit of black women in the Caribbean. She writes with the directness of the reggae lyric, with both pungency and humour, and with an aphoristic economy which has the art of saying more with less. Her poems encompass the lives of women old and young; middle-class and sufferers; women whose lives are enclosed, who want liberation from the 'station of motherhood, wifehood and frustration', and women who through their resistance, creativity and assertion of selfhood have made space for themselves. The celebration of such lives stands as a beacon of hope in the depiction of Jamaican society in which rape, poverty and abandonment are too frequently women's lot.Jean Goulbourne grew up in rural Jamaica. She has worked as a teacher and a publications officer. She was the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and an honorary fellowship at the Iowa Institute of Writing Programme.

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Book SynopsisWhen the guitars tickle a bedrock of drum and bass, when the girl a shock out and a steady hand curve round her sweat-smooth waist, when the smell of Charlie mingles with the chemicals of her hair and the groove is of the sweetest friction - how is a young man to keep his way pure?Kwame Dawes's poetry rises to new heights in these psalms of confession and celebrations of reggae's power to prophesy, to seek after righteousness and seduce the body and mind. Here is poetry walking the bassline, which darts sweetly around the rigid lick of the rhythm guitar yet expresses all the sadness and alienation at the heart of reggae. This, for Dawes, is the earth which 'never tells me my true home' and where behind every chekeh of the guitar there is the ancestral memory of the whip's crack. Shook Foil dramatises the conflict between the purity of essences and the taints of the actual, not least in the poems which focus on Bob Marley's life. Here is the rhygin, word-weaving prophet and the philanderer with the desperate hunger for yard pumpum, the revealer of truths and the buffalo soldier who has married yard with show biz affluence. Above all there is the intense sadness of Marley's death, for how can one live without the duppy conqueror's defiant wail in an island gone dark for the passing of his song?But for Shook Foil there is always the gospeller's hope that the dead will rise from dub ruins and patch a new quilt of sound for the feet to prance on. And when the high hat shimmering and the bass drum thumping, what else to do but dance?"Throughout the collection, Dawes captures the many dimensions of reggae from the psalmic to the prophetic that are yet to be explored by other writers and musicians. Reggae remains unparalleled in its ability to absorb other influences and remain true to itself and to capture beauty, pain, and pleasure in a one-drop riddim. Its syncopation suggests a break, a gap - somewhere to fall with the faith that you will be caught - and this is what gives reggae its redemptive value. To really enjoy the music, you must believe. The same could be said of Shook Foil."Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean Writer.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Book SynopsisAnthony McNeill was without doubt amongst the finest contemporary Caribbean poets, whose previous collections were hailed as works of immense originality. Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child won the 1995 Jamaican National Literary Award. Completed shortly before his death, it is a farewell to the world which moves like a bird in flight between moments of painful regret, wry humour and a sense of closure. Anthony McNeill's word-lanterns will continue to flame in the darkness long beyond his death.Anthony McNeill was born in Jamaica in 1941 and died in 1996. His previous collections include Reel from 'The Life Movie' (1972) and Credences at the Altar of Cloud (1979).

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Book SynopsisComparing herself to a douen, a mythical being from the Trinidadian forests whose head and feet face in different directions, Jennifer Rahim's poems explore states of uncertainty both as sources of discomfort and of creative possibility.The poems explore a Trinidad finely balanced between the forces of rapid urbanisation and the constantly encroaching green chaos of tropical bush, whose turbulence regularly threatens a fragile social order, and whose people, as the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers, are acutely resistant to any threat to clip their wings and fence them in.In her own life, Rahim explores the contrary urges to a neat security and to an unfettered sense of freedom and her attraction to the forest 'where tallness is not the neighbour's fences/ and bigness is not the swollen houses/ that swallow us all'. It is, though, a place where the bushplanter 'seeing me grow branches/ draws out his cutting steel and slashes my feet/ since girls can never become trees'.Jennifer Rahim is Trinidadian. She also writes short fiction and criticism. She is currently Senior Lecturer at The Liberal Arts Department, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.

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Book SynopsisStewart Brown has been described as "one of the most exciting and original poets currently writing" and praised by Fred D'Aguiar for the "peculiar chameleon-like power of his imagination to belong anywhere and to any experience without becoming compromised". The poems in this collection encompass Africa, the Caribbean, Wales and England; and range from the sweep of imperial history and its painful aftermath, to the intimacies of domestic life. He writes of Africa and the Caribbean with a rare combination of sympathy, honesty and inwardness, while never pretending to be other than an Englishman abroad. He writes affectionately but without sentiment of 'ordinary' English life from the perspective of one who has been elsewhere, in ways which allow us to see it afresh.But if these poems have a passionate concern with love, politics, history and the natural world, they are no less concerned with the shaping power of art, both as a subject and in the poems' own formation.Elsewhere brings together, frequently in much revised form, the best work from his earlier much praised collections (Mekin Foolishness, Zinder and Lugard's Bridge) with many new poems. The long sequence 'Elsewhere', which brings Brown's painterly eye and witty humanity to the experience of living in the Caribbean, and 'Elmina', a moving and imaginative meditation on an Englishman's sense of complicity in the history of the slave trade, will further enhance his reputation.Stewart Brown is the editor of several major anthologies as well as critical studies of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Martin Carter.

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Book SynopsisThe poems in Curry Flavour will grab you with their exuberant recreation of the dramas of an intensely experienced inner life. Their imagery is sensuous, drawn from, among other sources, the flora and fauna of the Caribbean landscape. Their voice is erotic, humorous, subversive, prayerful, angry, revolutionary and celebratory.Inspired by the all-embracing nature of the Hindu Gods, these poems attack biases and false polarities of all kinds, not least between stereotypes of gender, the sexual and the spiritual and the personal and the political. They express a New World, pan-Caribbean consciousness which is rooted in a womanist revisioning of her Indian ancestral heritage and a childhood and youth spent on the sugar-growing Caroni plains of Trinidad.With the ceremonial incense of prayer, the ripe mango-syrup of erotic celebration, the pungency of wild coriander and shadon beni of the Creole folkworld, this is a feast for all the senses, blended together but keeping fresh all their individual piquancy, accompanied by the sound of tassa and steelband, simmered over a fire that burns away the jumbies of homophobia, incest, violence and racial hatred."It's not very often that a debut collection of poems can entertain, instruct and enlighten, yet Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming's Curry Flavour does this with confidence and wit..."Geoffrey Philp, The Caribbean WriterLelawattee Manoo-Rahming was born in Trinidad in 1960. A mechanical/building services engineer and part-time college lecturer, she now lives in Nassau, Bahamas.

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Book SynopsisFrom the vantage point of later middle life, Ian McDonald's collection looks into the heart of time passing: the coming death of ageing parents, the old men, the 'archive' of a disappearing Guyana who die one by one, the sight of 'my own lines of age' and the loss of pleasure in the glittering carnival of the senses. There are rich blessings of the arrival of a new child coming unexpected at this stage of life; and the consolations from books and in the power of art to preserve - at least for a time. But the very joys are made more piquant by the inescapable sense of the transitoriness of all things.Poems of moving domestic intimacy and humour ('To alarm their father's half to death / New-born babies hold their breath'), valedictory requiems for the characters who have given Georgetown life its flavour and regret for the country's loss of civility during its darkest recent years and songs in praise of nature are all part of a vision which looks into the darkness but says, 'Yes, it is as you say, / But let us get just one thing straight: / There is beauty in the world / ... And the star-tree blossoms in the night, / Night that will have an end' and asserts, 'Between silence and silence, there should be only praise.'Ian McDonald is Trinidadian by birth and Guyanese by long residence and adoption. He is the author of the recently filmed The Hummingbird Tree, four collections of poetry and a play. He edits Kyk-over-Al.

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Book SynopsisAcknowledging an inheritance fostered in the seed-bed of Guyana, land of six peoples and transitional territory between the Caribbean and Amerindian South America, Andrew Jefferson-Miles's Art of Navigation comprises three poems exploring the community of man and his expeditions in imagination and reality. Legend, myth, and intuition find equal footing with Heidegger, quantum physics and qualitative theory. 'Art of Navigation', the title poem, is the dreaming and redreaming of potent new frameworks for history. It follows, through different histories, man's ongoing search for an undiscovered continent. Two currents in the poem meet and merge: one, official, like the chain of events which constitute a written history; the other to be found in those overlooked links which slip away, tantalizingly, to resettle in the seed-bed of the culture. 'Sestina of Sestina's' explores the echoes of landscape between Wales and the poet's remembered Guyana in ways which tap Jefferson-Miles's sense of his cross-cultural inheritance, whilst 'Malory' transplants Gwendolyn and Myrddin (Merlin) from an ancient Celtic myth (which has resonances with Amerindian myth) into the twentieth century, and travel by train, writing a new text for an ancient fragment to position the reader in a new configuration with the world.Andrew Jefferson-Miles is a poet and artist.Trade Review"Wilson Harris writes: "Art of Navigation makes a potential architecture of the heart in swifts and herons, These volatile, heraldic creatures appear like a quickening in the poem and speak of a correspondence of parts in which the family of man is suspended in the net of nature, psyche, and cosmos.

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Book SynopsisIn the Xango ceremony, the contraries of New World African experience find transcendence. From the established, bodily patterns of ritual comes release into the freedom of the spirit; from the exposure of pain comes the possibilities of healing; and for the individual there is both the dread aloneness with the gods and the 'we-ness' of community.Simultaneously the rites celebrate the rich, syncretic diversity, the multiple connections of the African person in the New World and enact the tragic search for the wholeness of the lost African centre. And there is the god himself, standing at the crossroads, 'beating iron into the shape of thunder', both the prophetic voice warning of the fire to command the creator who hammers out sweet sound from the iron drum.Geoffrey Philp finds in Xango a powerful metaphor that is both particular to the Caribbean and universal in its relevance. If his first collection, Florida Bound, was characterised by the exile's bittersweet elegies of regret, and the second, Hurricane Center, stared edgily into the dark heart of a threatening world, Xango Music brings a new sinewy toughness of line to an ever deepening vision of the dynamic polarities of human existence."Using rhythm and riffs, he can pull the stops on language and give it a high energy kick. In 'jam-rock' he winds up with 'the crack of bones, the sweat of the whip; girl, you gonna get a lot of it; get it galore; my heart still beats uncha, uncha uncha, cha'(31).David and Phyllis Gershator, The Caribbean Writer. Philp successfully uses a variety of traditional forms, including the sestina - not an easy form to master but masterfully handled in 'sestina for bob.' Eclectic, the poet pays homage to Kamau Brathwaite, Bob Marley, and Derek Walcott.Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

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Book SynopsisA richly complex continuum of voices and characters inhabits these poems. An ecstatic hermit cultivates saints' body parts in a hothouse by the sea. A washerwoman invokes Oshún, orisha of love, while scrubbing laundry, and then a songbird magically appears. A fisher's acolyte son 'flies from island / to island, wreathing with rain-lilies / light houses, masts, and campanili'. An exiled Caliban meditates on the music of lifeless creatures as a source of power and aesthetic revelation. A communist Afro-Cuban dockworker rails against sugar as the black man's curse, while on a sugar plantation European Jewish immigrants and black cutters celebrate their common diasporic heritage. His verse rich in imagery and metaphor, the poet constructs a cosmic vision of the Caribbean that weaves African, European, and indigenous elements into a vibrant new synthesis, creating islands at once strange and familiar, haunting and sublime. Orlando Ricardo Menes writes poetry of baroque imagination and passionate energy."Cuban-American Orlando Ricardo Menes is not only a compelling poet, he's a storyteller, telling his stories in the first person or in a charged and compressed narrative. The poet touches all bases - magic realism, humor, irony, horror, mystery, mysticism - laced with references to tropical flora, fauna, history, and the melding of African and European religious mythologies."Phyllis and David Gershator, The Caribbean WriterOrlando Ricardo Menes was born in Peru to Cuban parents. He has lived most of his life in Florida, and considers himself a Cuban American. He currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

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Book SynopsisStanley Greaves brings a painter's perceptions and a musician's ear to the writing of this substantial selection of his poetry written over the past forty years. He describes his painting as 'a kind of allegorical story-telling' and the same kind of connections between the concrete and the metaphysical, and the presence of the extraordinary in the ordinary are found in his poems.Greaves guesses at a background that includes African, Amerindian and European ancestry, but declines to relate to any of these in an exclusive way. Rather he writes out of a creole sensibility that celebrates Guyanese diversity: Afro-Guyanese folkways, Amerindian legend and Hindu philosophy. Nor does he reject Europe, and in his poetry and his painting explores connections between European Surrealism and the intuitive elements within Guyana's heterogeneous culture.To enter the collection is to discover a whole, self-created world of Blakean richness, one which is never static, but growing to encompass new elements. Greaves's is a dialectical vision, alert both to the movements of history and the minutiae of daily change.His themes include family, daily life, metaphysical speculation, the hard years of social collapse and political repression in Guyana, the strange visitations of inner imaginative life and his comradeship with the great Guyanese poet Martin Carter. His is a sensibility 'welcoming as the earth is/ for every floating seed/ on stairs of air and rain'.This collection won the 2002 Guyana Prize for the best first collection of poetry.Stanley Greaves was born in Guyana. He is one of the Caribbean's most distinguished artists and an accomplished classical guitarist. He currently lives in Barbados.

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Book SynopsisSince Kwame Dawes first published his prestigious Forward Poetry prize-winning Progeny of Air in 1994, six further collections have followed which have changed the face of Caribbean poetry. New and Selected Poems contains a generous selection from all these volumes, and a book's worth of new poems.Sensitive to the dusty savannahs of Ghana (where he was born), the hills and city streets of Jamaica (where he grew up), the 'low-riding, swamp' landscapes of South Carolina (where he lives) and the landscapes of England (where he regularly visits), Dawes has been building an enthusiastic readership in the UK, the Caribbean and the USA.New and Selected Poems does not replace the earlier collections. Indeed, the selections here will whet the appetite of those who have not yet discovered them to encounter their individual, organic and rewarding architectures and for those familiar with the earlier books, this selection will suggest new ways of reading them.Kwame Dawes is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

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Book SynopsisAdisa Jelani Andwele is AJA, one of the leading performance poets in the Caribbean. An outstanding jazz trombonist, with his six-piece band, Fuzion, Adisa puts his poetry to a lively, uplifting, musical backdrop of Caribbean rhythms and jazz, stirring up a storm with his conscious poetry and his pioneering musical styles of 'Saf' and 'Ringbang'. Antiquity captures the energy and passion of AJA the performer for a wider audience of readers.Writing from Barbados, which used to see itself as an English county (Bimshire), Adisa Andwele uncovers and celebrates an African Barbadian heritage of resistance and cultural creation, with its own heroes such as Bussa, Nannie Grigg and Clement Payne. But if Antiquity celebrates the survival of this heritage, despite the efforts of Barbados' former colonial and neocolonial rulers to bury or ignore it, it also warns, in urgent rhythms and striking images, of its threatened obliteration by the new forces of global/Americanised culture.Antiquity has two sections: 'Words', which brings together poems written over the past twenty years, and 'Chants', which includes the songs AJA has been performing to enthusiastic audiences across the Caribbean, North America, Europe and South Africa. These are poems and songs of a radical Black consciousness, Barbadian to the core, but reaching out to chant down injustice and economic oppression wherever they exist.Whilst readers have begun to be familiar with the reggae influenced nation-language poetry of Jamaica or the calypso influenced poetry of Trinidad, the cultural grass-roots of Barbados have received little exposure. In this collection, a celebration of Barbadian nation-language, the rhythms of its music and its distinctive African-derived culture, Adisa Andwele changes all that.Adisa Jelani Andwele is AJA, one of the leading performance poets in the Caribbean, and an outstanding jazz trombonist. He was born and lives in Barbados.

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Book SynopsisHeron's Canoe explores the intersections and folds within the history of the collision between the cultures of Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Focusing on the journey the Yoruba gods made with slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean, on resonances with Amerindian myths concerning the scattering of their gods, and on the transformations of each within the creolising, hybridising culture of the Caribbean, Mark De Brito's poem is a highly original meditation on the both the nature of the African diaspora and the nature of history. He makes imaginative use of found text from historical sources, translations of Yoruba prayers and invocations, but there is always a deeply personal tone to these carefully crafted poems.Heron's Canoe is the English translation for the Carib name of a constellation that lies in the region of Ursa Major, significant to Amerindian myths of origin, which Mark De Brito's poem connects to other myths of origin, particularly those of West Africa which reached the Caribbean in the submerged belief systems and religions of the African slaves. De Brito joins that small group of Caribbean poets and novelists whose work explores the existence of a distinctive Caribbean cosmology as the root of a nativist literary aesthetic.De Brito's approach is both personal and intellectual: as a Black British person who has explored his Trinidadian family roots and through them the manifestations of Africa in Trinidad in the Orisha chapelles, but also as a writer inspired by the work of Wilson Harris in his emphasis on the importance of the broken and buried legacies of the Caribbean.Mark De Brito was born and lives in the UK. His family originated in Trinidad.

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Book SynopsisBetween the title poem and other poems in the collection, Michael Gilkes sets up a dialogue about memory and experience through time. Joanstown celebrates, in the voice of both younger and older selves, the interweaving of a loved woman and a place. The elegant Georgetown of the 1940s, with its 'cross-stitching of avenues, bridges, canals' is transfigured by the presence of the beloved as she becomes the city's embodiment. The very concreteness of the recreation of a time when happiness came so easily, and of the genesis of a marriage whose seeming perfection leads to hubris, is made the more moving for the reader by the framing awareness of its evanescence.But there are other frames that transform the experience of loss into the consolations of art. In exploring the ancient hinterland of metamorphosis behind metaphor, Gilkes puts change at the heart of life. There is the transformation by love's fire of the lumpen boy, the class clown, 'a quasi-Quasimodo humped over a wooden desk', into the transfigured bridegroom whose 'body... floated towards the organ loft', or of the town's zinc roofs which 'curled like leaves' over the burning city, or of Joanstown's innocence inverted in the horror of Jonestown: 'carnage in paradise'. Another frame uses the base elements. In Guyana, fire and flood represent a constant cycle of destruction and renewal. This offers a rich source of visual metaphor but also brings to the poems a sense of time beyond the linearity of loss. The mud, rivers and rainforest of Guyana give birth, for instance, to the iridescent imagination of Wilson Harris, the 'steersman' whose example Gilkes so gracefully acknowledges.There are poems of lyric grace, intellectual playfulness and ironic wit; poems where Gilkes brings a painter's eye to his descriptions of both urban Guyana and its rainforests. Carefully sculpted sonnets, dramatic monologues, a pithy Creole letter and a calypso narrative show the range of Gilkes' voice, revealing him to be not only one of the Caribbean's most distinguished critics and dramatists, but a poet of major accomplishment. Joanstown won the 2002 Guyana Prize as the best collection of poetry.Michael Gilkes was born in Guyana in 1933 and left in 1961, but has never strayed far from Guyana and the Caribbean. He is one of the region's foremost literary critics and playwrights, as well as an actor, director, film-maker and university lecturer.

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Book SynopsisHoward Fergus is amongst a very small minority of Montserratians. He lives in Montserrat. Emigration has taken generations away and the 1997 eruption of Soufrière destroyed two-thirds of its habitable space, its economy and drove the majority of its inhabitants into exile. The poems in Volcano Verses express the confidence that island life and folk will outlast volcanic tantrums, that though 'Tonight Chances pique still grows/...But cattle low and egrets ride/ Inspite of fire from mountain tides'. But what Fergus seems to be doing in the book is writing against the absences, writing into being again the people who have gone, the landscape utterly transformed, the society fragmented. The eruption has instigated the sternest truth-telling, the sense of a world purified, but it has also prompted a hugely heightened consciousness of the importance of the seemingly trivial, the myriad social interactions, the sounds, the smells of a literally vanished world. It is the very absences, the restriction of current possibility that drives Fergus to greater abundance of creation, in the conversational, muscular rhythms, the serious word-play that characterise his most mature and distinctive collection yet.Sir Howard Fergus was born in Montserrat. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Cotton Rhymes (1976), Green Innocence (1978) and Stop the Carnival (1980).

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Book SynopsisFrom beginnings secreted in the folds of her mother's sari, transplanted to England to struggle with the rough musicality of Mancunian vowels, Raman Mundair, a Punjabi Alice, found no true reflection of herself, no wonderland, but mirrors which dissolved, shrank and obscured her size. In these poems she creates her own universe and dissects its realities in all their complex, tragic and surreal forms.At the heart of the collection is an acute sensitivity to the body: hurt, aroused, desired, ignored. Her poems spill out from this centre: to the physical memory of domestic violence, the intense joys of intimacy and love, and the pain of their rejection, to a passionate concern with the body politic. Here, whether her focus is on the non-sense of religious exclusion, the seismic fault of partition that continues to tremor, or the racist murders of Stephen Lawrence and Ricky Reel, the approach is oblique, metaphorical, observant of the details that carry the poems beyond political statement. For Mundair, there is, too, a world beyond Britain, seen with more than just a vivid eye for the ironies and pleasures of travel.Raman Mundair's voice encompasses the most delicate, shimmering images and a raw, abrasive, sometimes angry energy. There is a probing intellect at work that arranges the world in new ways, and a sensuous truth to feeling that puts the reader inside the experience of the poems. Each poem has its own distinctiveness, but there is also an architecture that makes the collection a satisfying whole.There is room, too, for a sense of the absurd and a macabre sense of humour. How would you deal with the thief of your heart?"She is constantly sensual... tempered by a delicate care for detail, a quality of consideration that engages in the philosophical in sometimes complex ways..." - Kwame DawesRaman Mundair is a writer and artist. She was born in Ludhiana, India and came to live in the UK at the age of five. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, A Choreographer's Cartography and Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves.

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Book SynopsisA crime-novel in verse, View from Mount Diablo explores the transformation of Jamaica from a sleepy colonial society to a post-colonial nation where political corruption, drug wars, and avenging authorities have made life hell. The resentments class and racial privilege provoke underscore both the turmoil in society and the relationships at the heart of the narrative, between Adam Cole, a dreamy white boy driven by personal tragedy to crusading journalism, squint-eyed Nellie Simpson, once a servant, then a political enforcer, and stuttering Nathan, gardener and groom turned cocaine baron. Beyond this trio is a dazzling array of real and fictitious characters including Bustamante, coke-trade middleman Tony Blake, the informer Blaka, who finds religion, a corrupt plantation owner, and a murderous police officer. In a time when 'Blood / cheaper than drugs', View from Mount Diablo asserts the power of art to tell the truth, to use form and selection of incident to shape unmanageable circumstance into meaningful narrative, and touch the heart to stir the citizen to action. Rich with religious implication, this is a prophetic work of exasperated love, abandoning the softening light of 'an old romantic view' for a 'harsh, uncompromising glare' and blending lyrical narrative with wrenching tragedy.View from Mount Diablo won the 2001 Jamaican National Literary Award.Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals, including the London Magazine. He was the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies.

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Book SynopsisAfter teaching in England for many years, Ian House taught in Eastern Europe. He lives in Reading. This is his first collection.Trade Review“Ian House has created a world alive with luminous, existential clarity – playful, often sinister and always a little surreal. As much painter as philosopher, House illuminates his poems with an enormous visual delicacy, particularly strong in the poems set in Russia and Eastern Europe. I gabbled to strangers in the dark / as silence piled like snow. His intense sensibility creates a world stilled, flashing with colour, where meaning resides in the strange material beauty of the objective. Throughout the collection, in fragments of flight, sharp moments of solitary colour and sensuous detail, the formless takes on intricate form.” ~ Jane Draycott

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Book SynopsisDisplaying a love of patterns and cadences of the English language, this first collection by Gill Learner explores and examines crafts, technologies, painting and music. It also reflects on growing up and motherhood, and imaginatively retells legends, myths and superstitions.Trade Review“These diverse, amusing, sometimes chilling, entirely honest poems speak from the heart to the heart. Many are workbased and hold that undertow of regret for things past, good people, lives undervalued, probably gone for ever. There is anger here and always an unwavering belief in and respect for working people. This is poetry to savour.” ~ Mavis Cheek

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