Search results for ""Author Sarah Wardle""

The poems of Beyond take the reader back to the optimism Sarah Wardle found as a youth when she left home and became involved in the world. They show her venturing forth again, embracing life to find that all was never lost, as she finally overcomes obstacles to hope and allegations of disability she had almost allowed herself to think were insurmountable and true. The book traces her rediscovery of agency, direction, energy and love, and charts her course once more into the future. It chronicles her journey out of a care system into which she should never have let herself get deeper and deeper locked, and will give hope to others who wish to finance and negotiate their way out of this trap to take responsibility for their own lives. As in her previous collections, Fields Away, Score! and A Knowable World, the setting of many of these poems is London, but in these pages she gains an appreciation and understanding of the variety this city witnesses and offers as never before. Beyond is an affirming book: even as the flesh begins to age, the heart grows in courage and enthusiasm, reinvigorated by the realisation of the fresh possibilities of effort and resilience, confidence and self-belief, commitment and conviction, mutual trust and shared affection, and the work to be done before we sleep.

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Spiritlands invites you into a territory that is at once individual and plural. On the one hand, this is poetry about a personal geography, an eclectic landscape, space in which to be oneself and welcome who one chooses to express hospitality towards; on the other, these are poems all about hope, life and nature, about belonging to the whole world and asserting one’s right to a place and voice in it. The drive of this collection is spirit in the sense of the courage it takes to true to one’s instincts. There is a timelessness to the poems in this book and a sense of what endures. Here is oneness with existence, an appreciation of the universe, a happiness that springs from standing on the globe and the feeling of being a living, breathing soul in it.

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"A Knowable World" follows Sarah Wardle's detainment in a Central London psychiatric hospital for over a year for manic episodes of bipolar disorder. The poems chart the stresses of thirty-something city life through police arrests and hospitalisation under section orders to achieve a way out; then the threat and frustration involved in the fight for liberty and the patience needed to achieve recovery. Through commanding and apt expression, Sarah Wardle conveys bleak experience. These cathartic poems are themselves testimony to her ability to overcome the sense of futility, helplessness and panic involved in bipolar disorder. Form and technique have provided a framework for her to re-establish a sense of order and concentration out of chaos. "A Knowable World" bravely enlightens our understanding of mental illness.

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Sarah Wardle was poet-in-residence with Tottenham Hotspur FC when many of these poems were written. Her Score! is a winning commentary on contemporary culture, shooting at the heart of consciousness, family, sport, the female voice and Darwinian science. Her second collection kicks off with her Spurs poems, tackling the common ground between goals of competition and community. Then X: A Poetry Political Broadcast presents poetry as a beacon of imagination, choice and responsibility: the still, small voice that guides us through life’s terrain. Score! is completed by Sheet Music, a medley of poems ranging from London to Stone Age man, Schrödinger's Cat to Nelson’s Column.

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