Search results for ""Cinnamon Press""

What is a life without Art and Beauty? 
Not one that Julia chooses to live. And so she searches the world for both, discovering happiness through the lens of a camera. A fictional account of pioneer photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, and her extraordinary quest to find her own creative voice, The Glass House brings an exceptional photographer to life. From the depths of despair, with her relationships strained and having been humiliated by the artists she has given a home to, Julia rises to fame, photographing and befriending many of the day’s most famous literary, artistic, political and scientific celebrities. But to succeed as a female photographer, she must take on the Victorian patriarchy, the art world and, ultimately, her own family. And the doubts are not all from others. As Julia’s uneasy relationship with fame grows into a fear that the camera has taken part of her soul, her search leads her full circle, back to India, in her lifelong quest for peace and beauty. A poignant, elegant and richly detailed debut from Jody Cooksley.

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We become like the river reflected, both light and dark. Struggling artist Sylvia is offered an unusual commission by the mysterious Victor, acting on behalf of a secret sponsor, who wants to engage her for a year to produce art depicting the Holocaust. She accepts the project on trust and discovers an enigmatic thirteen-year-old girl, Nina, who becomes her model and pupil. As the months pass, Sylvia begins to unravel the truth about Victor, the secret sponsor and Nina, while unearthing more about history and identity than she was ever prepared for. A family drama that champions the structures and beliefs that underpin a civilised society, The River Reflects faces the darkest shadows of human nature. With the Thames winding relentlessly through this compelling story, Sylvia, Victor, Nina and those around them progress from fear and isolation to seek love and fortitude and the redemptive power of the human spirit.

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In Domestic Damage, Jenny Morris explores a range of dysfunctional environments, strange relationships and experiences on the margins. Her work is lyrical, her imagery compressed and precise and her observation razor-sharp. The results are intelligent poems that see life sideways, that are not afraid to look into the shadows and the dark, but always with a compassionate gaze. Imaginative and poignant, but never sentimental; unflinching in the face of the gruesome, but never gratuitous, this is poetry that questions and reveals without judging; a mature and accomplished collection.

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Lyrical prose, a vivid sense of place and compelling characters who remain with us combine in this outstanding debut novel from Slovenian writer, Brigita Orel.

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Yvonne Baker has the ability to conjure a world that is at once recognisable and fresh. In this two-part collection we travel with those whose migration brings new worlds and loss in equal amounts. Who do we become in a different place separated from a land that still calls us? Who do we become if we remain behind? Baker interrogates these questions in sequences alive with vivid details, illuminated with affection and empathy. Here lives flutter down in fragments, a shelter is built of story, and unwritten rules for the poor are exposed. Here Irish aunts and other saints leap from the page, ready with an umbrella, making a holy show of themselves, or finding peace in the deep waters of the heart. Themes of belonging, memory and what haunts us run through all of Yvonne Baker's work, and her gift is to bring new perspectives to the questions we ask about what forms us, how we navigate a shifting world and how we remember those we love yet never fully know. At the heart of this collecti

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The alleged death of utopian fiction and its eclipsing by dystopia is, Rowan Fortune, cogently argues, grossly exaggerated. Reprising elements of their doctoral thesis on utopian fiction, Fortune provides not only an extensive chronology of utopia, but also gives writers a sense of the many flavours of this genre, arguing that its range and reach is as vibrant as ever and all the more urgent. This is a genre intensely in communication with itself, so that one cannot understand the richness of the tradition (nor what makes a good dystopias) without a broad reading. Morris makes less sense without Bellamy, Bacon without Andreae, and so on ... Maintaining a dialogue that goes back to the beginnings of modernity (to More's moral objections to the emerging class forces of his period, the violences of the enclosures and the new secular form of rulership) Fortune demonstrates in their lively and densely packed analysis how concerns about the ordering of a good society; of women's suffering the patriarchy; of people oppressed by racism; of ecology ... are at the heart of utopian discourse. Moreover, Writing Nowhere, establishes not only that utopia still has much to say, but that its ability to straightforwardly convey the most intimate values of the author is a sign of the genre's essential courage. And, in terms of narrative, there remains room to innovate so that, 'The best way to read utopia is to read with the intention of writing your own.' Writing Nowhere will guide you in this adventure. Whether you write short stories or novels, it will set you on the road to engaging powerfully in the utopic tradition, inspiring you to respond to it directly in what you write.

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Acutely observed, incisive and precise, The Remaining Men sees Martin Figura combining precision, wit and compassion to produce a collection that is linguistically dexterous and deeply effective.

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World-famous actor Harry Whittaker dies only to find he must haunt all the people he mistreated and, perhaps, loved.

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Witty and self-reflexive take on the sonnet the latest pamphlet from the widely respected Scottish poet.

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Galvanised by a health scare, Felix Walton's chances of remaking himself by ending his forty-two-year marriage may be slight, but they are otherwise zero, so he ups and runs from London to Norwich in search of a new start. His family's distress has him doubting his decision, and he must unravel the sad truth of his marriage if he is not to give in to remorse and go home. In a chaotic household of waifs and strays run by a warm, erudite earth mother, his fellow lodgers open his eyes to lives unlike his own, help him to make peace with his conscience and find meaning and joy, but the price is unforeseen danger.

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The willingness to take risks with form and to push the reader’s expectations of what a poem might be make E A Griffiths’ poetry immediately distinctive. Here we find lyrical poems that are tiny, elliptical, often heart-breaking and utterly located in a sense of place that is at once home and yet the terrain of struggle. Drawing on Welsh tradition and the complexity that spins from needing to learn your native language so that even when it becomes fluent it never becomes the language of dream, the collection also opens a dialogue with concrete poetry. It’s a move that allows words to fragment, names to partially mirror themselves, breath to expand the possibilities of the poem on the page. The concrete poetry in this collection is as serious as a funeral, or electric shock therapy, yet it is also playful, generous and expansive. Moving between the concrete and the lyrical, Concrete Sea is a cohesive, tightly-written debut that invites us to feel into the experiences of the poems, emerging with the sense of another’s heart-print.

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From its tentative first word (‘perhaps’) to the final phrase, realising ‘here is no journey / only attending to stones— / like a story told yet again / by an old friend’, the reader is immersed in a woodland that is alive with quiet yet profound epiphanies—the way we live and die; the way we might weave narratives that change our stories. In this liminal place, which is both a real woodland and an internal space, we learn that ‘What matters is the silence that encircles you...’ And we find in that silence a liturgy of the natural world we too often forget we are part of.

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Out in the Field immerses us deeply in a compulsion to be outside—here we draw inspiration from landscape, birds, weather; here we step outside ourselves, and allow our perspective to shift... Drawn into the fields through Patricia Helen Wooldridge’s meticulous observation, our minds breathe alongside the poet’s. Within the spell of these pages we find ourselves in a world with a different notion of time and change. We find ourselves in the moment. A maven of attention, Wooldridge’s acute reflections make each seasonal shift fresh, each creature and plant precious and beautiful, each encounter with the natural environment unexpected. And, as we open ourselves to this world through these poems, our humanity and passion for this ailing and extraordinary planet can only be enlarged, compelling the reader in turn out into the field.

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Lynn Valentine is a distinctive new voice in Scottish poetry. With hints of fairytale and gothic, she writes precise and poignant poems embracing what is often overlooked or peripheral – a father who drives the snowplough, a childless woman seeking consolation from a Sheela-na-gig. This collection is alive with horses, crows, deer, and as the title suggests, bees; all points north. — Jay Whittaker Enhanced by her apt and confident use of Scots, which glimmers like gold leaf throughout, Lynn Valentine’s poems weave the ethereal with the everyday, and reveal to us a glimpse of the natural and unnatural world we stride and stumble through. From council workers to prophetic aunts, Mills and Boon to the winter solstice, the poems here are full of making do and doing without, of childhood and childlessness, of the grief of loss and the grief of absence. This is a special collection, and a wonderful debut. — Aoife Lyall Lynn Valentine is a fearless writer who tackles the great unspeakables head-on — bereavement, loss, childlessness, exile; and yet it’s not death that prevails in these poems, but rather the sovereignty of life and, with all its gifts and with all its heartbreaks, the obstinate beauty of the living world.— John Glenday

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2121: Wading through a drowned fenland, Jean is searching for a lost village and a hillside church that appears only in dim memories of the world before it was engulfed by rising sea levels, deserts and floods. She is looking for a time capsule buried over 160 years ago, a symbol of hope for a different future. 1958: Coming of age in a drab and exhausted post-War London, Ida finds herself questioning the assumptions of her mother and her Uncle Roy. Wanting more from life, she is drawn into circles of political activism, jazz clubs, and life lived on the margins of conformist society - places where there are as many questions as there are possible answers. Separated by decades and a planet turned upside down by climate shifts, the lives of these two women begin to draw together. As Jean closes in on the location of the time capsule and Ida prepares to take part in the first Ban the Bomb march to the nuclear weapons research centre at Aldermaston, their fates dramatically collide.

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When it comes to those we love, even our most yearned-for states of union are subject to change. afterlove endures the swarming devastations of loss as consummately as it enters love’s raptures, ever alive to devotion’s flow and ebb. From domestic paean centred on the beloved, through a father’s unabashed affection for his children, to the sometimes savage realisations of love’s dissolution, these poems succeed in spanning relationship heaven and hell. Mario Petrucci generates love (and non-love) poetry that refuses to squint in the glare of experience. With characteristic candour and inventiveness, whether through light-filled lyric or a murderous remaking of myth, Petrucci takes us just about everywhere love can go.

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An exhilarating and powerful poetry pamphlet, that is as direct as it is accomplished. Loose the smouldering arrow: start the fire. While the prey-birds circle, drench my pyre with precious oils and let me blaze once more. (from Codicil)

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Jay Whittaker's debut collection, Wristwatch, won the 2018 Saltire prize for Poetry Book of the Year. In this eagerly awaited follow-up, Jay explores themes of origin, asking what shapes us most: our biological heritage or the societies we find ourselves born into? Her work draws deeply from the landscapes of the Hebrides and East Lothian, from the natural world in general. Yet, often, it returns to the fleshly bodies we inhabit and through which we experience everything — as in her debut, in Sweet Anaesthetist Jay discusses the frailty of the body and the task of living with cancer — but she also turns outwards, to beings encountered and too easily overlooked in the rush of the day-to-day: friends, acquaintances, the smallest creatures with which we share our days. Culminating in the prose poetry sequence, 'Egg Case', Sweet Anaesthetist is a vibrant, transfixing plunge into the stuff of life itself.

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Exploring how humanity is rooted in and linked to everywhere and everything, David Batten brought a fresh voice and precise language to his reflective, but ultimately hopeful debut, Transhumance. In Untergang, he moves from the open, cosmic, affirming tone to a sequence that is internally reflective — darker, almost claustrophobic. Whereas his first collection ended on the plateau, in the light, anticipating summer, Untergang starts indoors in the dark of a power cut in the depth of winter and finishes inside the writer’s ribcage, where it is even darker. This is not a world without hope, but it is one that urgently needs to wake, to face the dark and change it. Increasingly confident, Batten uses his distinctive, lyrical voice as a call to reflect on what might really matter in life.

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The Love Life of Bus Shelters uses the sequence form to uncover a quasi-allegorical significance in urban spaces and institutions. It's quirkily witty and accessible but it bristles with defamiliarising and sometimes profound insights.

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Linguistically dexterous, scintillating with intelligence and wit, and balancing incisive observation with deep compassion, the short fictions in Y Knots draw us into the lives of characters we feel completely involved with. Here we have a hall of mirrors in which the writer mines his soul for images that reflect the story. But in interrogating the self, what Omar Sabbagh produces is an engaging array of unique perspectives on all our souls.

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1983. A kibbutz on the bank of the river Jordan. After a fateful protest march and on the eve of her wedding, a young woman leaves for England, never to return. Decades later, her daughter begins to uncover the devastating reality of her mother's childhood in a social experiment that discarded family life in favour of the collective, but can the truth ever be recovered? Spanning the years from 1967–2010, Night Swimming in the Jordan dives into what it means to grow up in someone else’s utopia, where the threat of war is ever present and relationships are coloured by ideology.

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The Hand of Love is a book that was never meant to be published, never to have an audience. A collection of poems meditating upon the theme of love, crafted by the hand, inked by a poet compelled to write a soul's musing on love, the experience at the heart of being human. This debut collection of poems is Book One of a trilogy, the prelude of love. The author is currently working on Book Two, the letter L, a Literary Affair: Poet & Muse.

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I am Eve. Collector of words. I look them up. I write them down. I knead them into sentences. I am the story. When her mum rescues a book from a garbage can, Eve's life changes. She reads her way into the stories, into a place in the world, worlds she never knew existed. Eve becomes the story. Everything is possible. But with adulthood comes deception and betrayal; to survive Eve strips life bare. No stories, no people, no connection. But the stories are determined to win her back.

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Saoirse grows up hearing the extraordinary stories of family members who died before her birth or in early childhood. Her aunt Miriam, who believed she had lived across a thousand years to be with her lover in each generation, the Moorish Princess Casilda. Her grandmother, Daireann. more than a healer and wise woman, and her father, Oisin, an alchemist and magician. But who is Saoirse? I was Casilda's mother more than a thousand years ago, she tells her mother, Sarah. Tucked away under a mountain in Roscommon in Oisin's family home, Saoirse meets Faolan, a local boy lost in their garden maze. As they play out stories from myth, Faolan's loyalty and love grows, but Saoirse craves adventure and is not easily won. As their paths diverge, one momentous event threatens everything, leading Saoirse into a maze from which she might never emerge and taking Faolan on a quest on which their lives depend. Spanning back into the mists of pre-history; travelling from Roscommon to Paris, Prague to Brittany, Budapest to Nice, Zaragoza to Tromso, and bringing together Celtic mythology from Ireland and Brittany, Saoirse's Crossing asks questions of identity as contemporary as they are ancient, exploring the lengths we will go to for love.

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Following Roy’s boyhood in post-war rural Bedfordshire Open Strings immerses us in the countryside with its changing seasons and characters who accompany Roy as he makes the transition from childhood to adolescence. Often naïve, Roy struggles to understand much of the behaviour he witnesses, yet makes discoveries about himself and the human condition. Moving from ‘Flood’ with its echoes of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles and merging of memory, imagination and dream to the onset of school, that results in a vow of silence, and through the friendships, rivalries, hero-worship, first loves and moments of pushing the boundaries of behaviour that come with these early life stages, we arrive at ‘GDAE’ in which violence between strangers leaves Roy fleeing the scene as he has fled from other dilemmas. A poignant and convincing novella, Open Strings examines the way we make sense of the world with its moments of euphoria, its bewildering protocols, the strange behaviour of others and the small acts of betrayal that mark us deeply. Humane, engaging and authentic, Open Strings is a finely-observed collection and a compelling read.

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Welcome-welcome-welcome-welcome to Being Young! And to the inner life and internet ragepage of Natasha [Redacted]. Her rst name is all you’re getting: there are too many haters, trolls and stupid adults out there. Iffen you understand me then you’ve picked up the rhythm of my heartbeat and maybe you’re a friend. But that means you’re a potential danger too, if you get too close and you know too much—be careful. Original, compelling and moving, Natasha [Redacted] is a coming of age story that charts the costs of trying to survive in the poisonous jungle that is ‘growing up’. Family breakdown, friends who turn out to be anything but friends, parents and their love interests who want bland conformity above all else, Internet wars and real-world violence populate Natasha’s Internet ‘ragepage’. And we see Natasha too though her self-appraising ‘sleevenotes’, penned some unknown time after the events that she describes. At the end of it all, has she grown up? Will you like the answer anymore than Natasha does? Whatever the answer—if you’ve ever loved music with a matchless passion, wanted to form a band and play a gig on the Moon, you could be the friend that Natasha is waiting for. Read on...

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For Eleanor Barton, fleeing from the bombs of the Birmingham Blitz during World War II changes her life. On the Isles of Scilly, she negotiates a teaching contract, her own sexual awakening, and a decision about her future that will have repercussions for decades. Her course is set when she sails from the UK on the Queen Mary as one of thousands of GI brides. But the path she has chosen will not be an easy one. Struggling with issues of infidelity, gas-lighting, her 'outsider's' experience of racial apartheid in 1950s America and living within the bounds of Catholic teaching on contraception and marriage, Eleanor faces an uncertain future. But she persists, bolstered by her love for her daughter, Sadie. Spanning the 1940s to 1980s, Eleanor faces a stream of new challenges-not least the struggle to overturn the Decree of Nullity granted to her American husband by the Catholic Church, and her waning health. But a return visit to Scilly brings her life full circle and demonstrates the endurance of deep love. Exquisitely realised characters and a powerful story unite in Waiting for the All Clear, L.B. Gray's debut novel, to immerse readers in the ageless questions of what it means to make a good life and what are the boundaries that must be defended if we are to remain true to our own stories.

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How does a 5-year old girl navigate deep loss after a tragic car accident leaves her motherless? Charting a life-long process of sifting through grief and rediscovering hope, Memoirs of a Mask Maker honors the women who stepped in to help the girl stitch together a beautiful life-a grandmother, a neighbor and a pharmacist in Japan... Years later, when the global pandemic forced Kathryn Graven and everyone else inside, she responded by sewing hundreds of colorful masks for family, friends local mail carriers, friendly and not-so friendly neighbors, teachers, nurses and complete strangers. Each one included a note of encouragement as she discovered that making masks required not only artistic skills but re-learning how to tend grief and reclaim joy. Now, as global society faces immeasurable individual and collective grief, these lessons are gathered for a new crop of motherless daughters facing grief, and to begin a new conversation with readers about how we gather our tears and mend the tears.

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In Rhondda Burning paintings and poems mirror one another, reflecting on life in the eponymous valley or in the area around Cardigan Bay, with its wide horizons. Havard looks at his native environments with the eyes of both one who belongs and a wanderer whose long association with Spain impressed on him the kinship between the sister arts and the benefits that come when poets and painters breathe the same air. Growing up in a steep-sided valley set Havard’s visual DNA. Ten miles daily to school and ten back, upstairs in a double-decker bus with outcrops of rock and slag flashing by, left its mark. Watching his father at a window, craning his neck to scour the mountain for a break in the spillaging mist… These images were processed slowly and this depth of observation shines through both image and text. Elegant, deft and vital, this collection is an embodiment of people, places and communities that invite us to listen and see.

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When artist, Eve, leaves London to live alone where no one knows her in small-town Shipden on the north Norfolk coast, little does she suspect that the next eighteen months will change everything. As she writes to and receives emails from her travelling daughter, Jez, Eve’s story unfolds, filtered through her particular perspective, while around her, in the old house converted to flats, strange characters inhabit her new life. People like Hester, the eccentric widow of a once well-known journalist and Amos, a troubled man searching for a wife. But the quiet life is not what it seems. Eve’s relationship with a local poet, Choker is disturbed when Leo, an actor from her past, finds her. When ex-military-man, Knox, moves in to the house as others leave, her new sense of home is under question. And even in this secluded place, there are those who know more about Eve than she knows herself, like the two old Russian sculptors who can tell her about her unknown father. Inhabiting this fragile borderline, will Eve be able to make a new life fostering unwanted and troubled children? Will hope win the day in this story of secrets, death, grief, and the bonds that tie mother and daughter? A compelling debut novel from poet and artist, Jenny Morris.

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Journalist Simon, reporting on the Knights of Camelot theme park run by an eccentric Marquess, is drawn into a tangle of intrigue, witchcraft, alternative lifestyles, mythology and secret technology as he investigates mysterious disappearances in Glastonbury, including his new girlfriend, Jenny. On Jenny's trail, Simon joins Abballon, a female dominated community inspired by worship of the goddess Gaia, where the role of men is to serve obediently, modern technology is banned and all must obey the tyrannical ruler, Philomena. Cast out from Abballon, Simon uncovers a fiendish plot by a deranged scientist to transform abducted people into mythical creatures, from centaurs to satyrs, intended to populate the Marquess's new Mythological Magick theme park. Will Simon be able to rescue Jenny in time to prevent her metamorphosis into a mermaid?

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Jenny Morris has a gift for observation translated into fresh and lyrical imagery. In Eye Level she looks beneath the surface of memory with a wistful but never sentimental gaze. Here memory stains your bones' and we enter a landscape where mortality is never far away, yet there is also hope and resilience here, the ways in which we pass on hope to the generations below us because The story must go on and on.' Along the way, ancestors are honoured, the places and people who form us are witnessed and new generations are celebrated. Eye Level is a compassionate and intelligent collection leavened with verbal dexterity and wry humour from a mature and accomplished voice. A delight to read and re-read.

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In the midst of international carnage and calamity, a beloved member of the family dies. How do we react? Where does the mourning for kith and kin end and mourning for greater humanity begin? This deeply personal and heartfelt poetry collection by the reknowned Lebanese poet, Omar Sabbagh, deep dives into the trauma of our days.

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Alex Ingram is well-acquainted with sorrow. He's overcome childhood polio to become a successful singer whose lyric voice lays bare the joy and pain of being alive.' When tragedy strikes again, Alex finds hope through the healing power of music. And an epiphany awaits... an unforeseen encounter that changes everything. Standing alone but reconnecting with characters from Carole Strachan's acclaimed debut, The Truth in Masquerade, The Tenor Man's Story returns to the world of classical music. With a vivid and compelling story of love and loss, reminding us that life can be wonderful, often in the most unexpected of ways.

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Rooted in the land he dwells on, attuned to the ancestral lines of place and body and the resonances between the two, in Aubrac David Batten records our at-oneness with the nature that humanity too often attempts to fragment. Lucid, deeply effective and intelligent, these poems take us into a landscape where the past speaks loudly to the present and to the future, letting us know that we are not alone, not apart. In a year in which the poet himself moves through cycles of chemotherapy, along with the randomness of death, life and renewal re-assert themselves with the movement of the seasons. As he observes nature with a keenness of vision and attention that is present in every line, nature returns the gaze. A collection that bears witness to the human and more than human.

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Award-winning poetry pamphlet from the author of My Body Remembers.

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Lucid, linguistically dextrous, and woven through with Welsh phrases, and words and passages in French, this exquisitely observed sequence of haiku and haibun was written during lockdown, though only refers to Covid elliptically. There is nothing obvious here—instead there are connections—with nature, with relationships, with what is lost and what is saved.

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It’s winter, 1553. A small Italian hill town is under siege… In this narrative of uncommon endurance Alex Josephy inhabits place and people with lively precision. Told in the voices of women, including a chorus, a nearby mountain and the fortress herself, the uniting voice of the pamphlet is a ‘girl’, through whose eyes we see the minute details of life under immense stress and feel the nuances of loss, hunger and uncertainty. Again Behold the Stars is an intense immersion into a lockdown that challenges all the senses, one utterly different from the modern experience of lockdown during the Covid pandemic, yet also hauntingly resonant with it. Most vitally, the empathy evoked reaches us across almost five centuries, making us care in the present.

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When the darkness rises again, the light will return wherever people stand their ground. Two years after the events of The Standing Ground, the tiny outpost of Y Tir in North Wales becomes a refuge for those who want to live without implants—permanent links to government surveillance that are threatening to dominate people’s lives again. But can Alys, Luke and Emrys thwart the growing threats of the new tech-giants whose offers of enhanced memories and virtual lives mask the erosion of privacy and even humanity? As new enemies threaten Y Tir’s existence, and old enemies emerge to sew seeds of destruction, Alys’ and Luke’s lives are put under increasing pressure. But there are also allies, not least Alys’ and Luke’s daughter, Iris, who appears to have fallen out of the mists of Greek legend and into Celtic myth. Can Iris, more strange and powerful even than Myrddin Emrys, also known as Merlin, save the day for Y Tir? Skilfully combining near-future technologies of surveillance and immersive media with Arthurian legend and Greek mythology, this story of suspense is full of convincing and extraordinary characters. A breath-taking conclusion to The Standing Ground trilogy. But does this story ever end?

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Sue Lewis’s Journey has the ability to combine a conversational tone with exquisite phrases and images that surprise without any need for showiness. The quiet elegance of the poems, the sound patterns and pressure on language combine with a sensibility of the fragility of life that nonetheless refuses to be crushed. There’s a yearning ache in these pieces that remains unsentimental and leaves space for what isn’t or can’t be said; an intelligence that pays attention to the deepest connections and celebrates ‘the everyday enchantment’. from ‘Transmuted' You are my consolation, turning up the way you have, riddling out this burnt and blackened year and I can’t ask for more. Spring will come, I know that now. The white magnolias.

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Responding to the fragile borders between climate change and mental health to evolve into conversations around trauma, change, care and the natural world, The Chalk Butterfly explores images of home and the paradoxes around our simultaneous care and un-care for nature and language. Working backwards through the butterfly's life cycle, each phase examines the tipping points, vanishing or fractured boundaries between our environments (internal and external), reflecting on the damaging ways we step on both the earth and humanity. Yet in these precise, exquisitely realised prose poems there is also celebration of the overwhelming urge to adapt and help life thrive, a turning away from the despair that would accept we might 'just about manage' or even fail in favour of moments of transformation.

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Bonnie Thurston’s Forgotten Futures: a memoir is a tender heart’s cry and a passionate celebration in one. There is deep poignancy and longing here, but not a mawkish or maudlin word. We travel in two landscapes — the world inhabited with wonder for each small detail, and the internal world of half a couple, observing both the relationship’s moments of grace, joy and intimacy and those of wounding, longing and loss. In supple, accessible language, honed to beauty, these poems resonate with a sense of the sacredness of small things and the transforming power of memory. 'When Love Is Passed' When love is passed to you on a bone china plate like Petits Fours on a doily, accept with gratitude. Life holds enough awful, heavy crockery, and we have all eaten more than our share of sand.

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In his most personal collection yet, Omar Sabbagh brings a concentrated gaze to bear on turbulent emotions. Morning Lit is a deep and sustained exploration of fatherhood, marriage and bereavement: of love and its shadow side, which is loss. Crammed with symbolism, it is a work of maturity both emotional and poetic. — Fiona Sampson Omar Sabbagh offers his readers deeply contemplative—and even more deeply felt—windows into both the seemingly relentless tensions and nearly transcendent joys of family life. Sabbagh masterfully demonstrates the full range of his poetic voice and craftsmanship, choosing most often to approach profound tribulation and self-interrogation within precisely contained rhymes and rhythms while bursting effusively into wholly charming exaltations in celebration of his daughter. Here, nothing is valued more than kindness, yet, with its abundant references to philosophy, psychology, history, and economic theory, Morning Lit: Portals After Alia reminds us that being present and open to the struggles and wonders of our own lives requires every resource of mind and heart we have. — Kathleen Graber, author of The River Twice Here is a paean to fatherhood in all its terrifying joy and vulnerability. It evokes the gratitude of the born-again parent, the wonder of being programmed ‘to love unconditionally’, of being compelled to ‘agree, and agree, and agree’, and of acknowledging that one’s love is now one’s ‘only, final fear’. Luminous, tender and gently delirious, Omar Sabbagh’s poems celebrate an awakening into a new sacredness. — Arundhathi Subramaniam Bursting with thoughtful and ebullient verse [that] spills-over with warmth and joy at the birth of a daughter, Alia. Omar Sabbagh adds his distinctive voice to the literature of fatherhood.— Amy Wack, Poetry Editor, Seren Books

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[P]oems like delicate essays, in the sense of attempts-circling, being-with, tentative and tender [...] poems like seed heads, fragility and delicacy, balanced, a symmetry [...] seeding more thinking [... a tender] engagement with moss, air, horizon, the political, the scientific, the human, the non-human and the spaces-between where these things meet. The space on the page, within the poems, and between the poet writing and the world observed, is so delicately balanced. - Dr. Kim Lasky slow build inside/outside what is left unsaid what is beneath what is noticed what is undeclared what evolves, enmeshes, becomes, denies visual-like camouflage like a movement-eyes dance on page, not sure where to go feeling accumulate through pattern of words - many unsaid, but felt What is near talks about what is far-deep time-what is within-unsaid earth suffering earth joy, despite it all - Chris Drury [an exploration of] the political, the specifics of natural things (eg. birds, moss, trees, landscape), boundaries and spaces; and the sense of place, all with sensuality and infinite sensitivity, including the self and its relationship to nature. We were especially aware of how [the poems] handle the very contemporary sense of language with all its problems of reference [exploring] the interconnectedness of all things through linguistic and visual means. - Professor Peter Abbs & Dr. Lisa Dart

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