Search results for ""Author Lucy Newlyn""

A wonderfully accessible handbook to the art of writing and reading poetry—itself written entirely in verse“Reading this book, you get to know poetry from the inside, without the alienating or distracting effect of abstract definition. Knowledge of how poetry works is here imbibed not as a course of instruction but as a sustained pleasure."—Bernard O'Donoghue, University of Oxford, Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry How does poetry work? What should readers notice and look out for? Poet Lucy Newlyn demystifies the principles of the form, effortlessly illustrating key approaches and terms—all through her own original verse. Each poem exemplifies an aspect of poetic craft—but read together they suggest how poetry can evoke a whole community and its way of life in myriad ways. In a series of beautiful meditations, Newlyn guides the reader through key aspects of poetry, from sonnets and haiku to volta and synecdoche. Avoiding glosses and notes, her poems are allowed to speak for themselves, and show that there are no limits to what poetry can communicate. Newlyn’s timeless verse will appeal to lovers of poetry as well as to practitioners, teachers, and students of all ages.Onomatopoeia You’d play here all day if you had your way— near the stepping-stones, in the clearest of rock-pools, where water slaps and slips; where minnows dart, and a baby trout flop-flips.

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In 2002 Lucy Newlyn found herself incarcerated in a mental hospital in Leeds. She had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act as a danger to herself and others during a psychotic episode after several nights without sleep. The psychosis was triggered by nearly three years of grieving for a dead sister, followed by a vigil at her father's deathbed during which she hallucinated that his hospital ward was a trench in the First World War. The episode uncovered psychiatric problems, which led in due course to a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder (manic depression). This condition, which involves extreme mood swings, is classified as a disability and requires medication; but it is also a source of creativity, giving access to some unusual dimensions of human experience. In her fifteen-year diary, Lucy Newlyn discloses recurring episodes of mania, depression, hallucination and paranoid delusion. Describing her struggles with family life and the workplace, she de-mystifies bipolarity and critiques an environment which still, even in the twenty-first century, is suspicious of mental illness. Above all, she celebrates the discovery that writing poetry enables a cathartic engagement with her own condition. Diary of a Bipolar Explorer is not a self-help manual but a candid confessional memoir which offers no easy solutions. It involves a mixture of observation and reflection, interspersing poetry with prose. Written accessibly, it will appeal to anyone interested in mental illness, creative process and the life of the mind.

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The poems in Earth's Almanac emerged over a fifteen-year period following the untimely death of the poet's sister. Lucy Newlyn adapts the tradition of the 'Shepherd's Calendar' to the phases of grief, condensing a long process of reflection and remembering into the passage of a single year. The poems shift through forms and move between places - Oxford, Borrowdale, and finally Cornwall, where the poet finds a second home near the sea. In these intense expressions of love and loss, anger and guilt, there is no smooth path towards consolation.

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A work of historical fiction, an experiment in life writing and a verse drama designed to be read aloud. Vital Stream takes the form of a long sonnet sequence, revisiting six extraordinary months in 1802 - a threshold year for William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Parted when they were very young, the siblings had eventually set up home together in the Lake District, where they were to remain for the rest of their lives. After two years in Grasmere, William became engaged to Mary Hutchinson. There followed an intense period of re-adjustment for all three, and for his former lover Annette Vallon, who had borne him a daughter he had never met. During 1802 the Wordsworth siblings wrote some of their most beautiful work; these were their last months of living alone, and their writing has an elegiac quality. Their journey to see Annette Vallon and meet William's daughter for the first time took them through London to Calais during the brief Peace of Amiens, involving a careful dissociation from his past. Other complications coloured their lives, to do with Coleridge and his failing marriage. Lucy Newlyn draws all this material into the vital stream of her sequence. with a preface by Richard Holmes PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE WORDSWORTH TRUST

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'The one hundred and forty poems he wrote in the last two years of his life are a miracle. I can think of no body of work in English that is more mysterious.' - Michael Longley. When Edward Thomas died in the First World War, very few of his poems had been published, but he is now recognised as one of the finest and most influential poets of the last century. Although often referred to as 'a poet's poet', his writing has an almost universal appeal. He wrote accessibly, on traditional themes - the natural world, human relationships, transience and mortality. And yet his poetry is alive with the critical intelligence that came from years of writing non-fiction and reviewing verse. "Branch-Lines" captures the range of Thomas' achievement, not least by combining poetry with prose. In this unique collection, fifty-five contemporary poets reflect on Thomas' craftsmanship and enduring power. Some have chosen poems of their own in which they detect his influence, others have written new poems in his honour. Each poet has also contributed a piece of prose, and the volume contains an introduction, four critical essays, illustrations, a foreword by Andrew Motion and an afterword by Michael Longley. "Branch-Lines" offers a fascinating perspective on the workings of literary influence, with personal insights from some of the leading poet-critics of our time. 'The collection has a double value. It is a celebration of Thomas, and dignified tribute to his achievement; at the same time it bears witness to his powers of regeneration' - Andrew Motion. 'I read Thomas' collected poems at a sitting, poem by poem, all the way through and felt as I had not felt since reading Lawrence and Graves ten years before: I love this man, I can learn from him.' - David Constantine. 'I have always loved Edward Thomas' poetry' - Geoffrey Hill. 'He comes naturally, I think, to writers in English, like grass growing.' - U. A. Fanthorpe. 'When I started to try and write poetry and prose, a very uncertain beginning, it would have been even more uncertain if I hadn't read Thomas' poetry in my teens.' - Tom Paulin.

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"No city preserves the memory and signature of so many men. The past and the dead have here as it were, a corporate life..." Edward Thomas is now best known for the poetry he wrote between 1914 and his untimely death at Arras in 1917. But during his lifetime his reputation was based on the extraordinary body of travel writing, reviews, and critical books he produced against intense deadline pressures in order to feed his growing family. His travel books, most notably Oxford and The South Country have had an enduring appeal for all lovers the English countryside. Through these and his later poems, Thomas has come to be regarded as the quintessential English writer. And yet he was Welsh, observing and loving England as a semi-outsider. Oxford, published three years after he completed his degree, was Thomas's first major commission. In it, he gives an evocative account of Oxford's architecture, history, and customs, drawing on personal memories of undergraduate life at Lincoln College. His prose was written to accompany the paintings of Fulleylove, who shared his interest in juxtaposing Oxford's grandeur with the ordinary details of domestic life. Between them, the artist and the writer catch the beauty of this "city within the heart" at a pivotal moment in pre-war history, and give it to us as though it could last forever in that form. In a Critical Introduction, Lucy Newlyn examines the importance of Oxford as a historical record. But she also argues that it is a piece of vivid experimental prose, in which much of Thomas's later greatness is anticipated. Her analysis of his prose style shows how Thomas tries out the voices of the past, defining his own particular brand of Modernism by creating a kind of "bricolage" through allusion and imitation. Running steadily beneath the text's elaborate ventriloquism is the quiet ruminative voice of the authentic Thomas, edging ever closer to the simple speech rhythms of his lyric poems. This is the first critical edition of Oxford, giving long overdue credit to the book as an early masterpiece in the Thomas oeuvre.

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