Finding the Craic with Elizabeth Cook

In Finding the Craic, a new piece for the Royal Literary Fund, Elizabeth Cook considers how moments of vitality and connection make writing come alive for the reader.

“When it comes to reading and writing,” Elizabeth writes, “the craic, in my experience, is often to be found in moments that seem to interrupt an established regularity: they insist on their presence and inclusion despite not fitting into any preconceived pattern or expectation.”  Read the article on the RLF website.

Elizabeth’s latest collection When I Kiss the Sky was recently reviewed by Merryn Williams in Agenda magazine.  – “She is a compassionate, life-enhancing writer”

Find out more and buy a copy of When I Kiss the Sky here.

When I Kiss the Sky by Elizabeth Cook

It gives us great pleasure to announce our second publication for autumn 2021, Elizabeth Cook’s profound and revelatory new collection When I Kiss the Sky.

These poems explore the dynamics of presence and absence, the shapes they make and the continuities between them. There is lament but also affection and delight, along with a strong curiosity about the nature of change. Cook writes with simplicity and intensity, finding vivid and subtle life in what she notices.

A most welcome new collection from Elizabeth Cook: necessary, sustaining poems that brim with luminous insights and remind us time and again that there is another world and it is in this one – Michael Laskey

Find out more and order a copy here!

Review in London Grip

D.A. Prince has reviewed When I Kiss the Sky in London Grip magazine, writing “[The poems’] energy comes from the keenness of her observation and her understanding of how the counter-play of presence and absence can shape poems. […] Attention to pattern, both within nature and human belief, underpins her collection.

So much of this collection deals with the inevitable process of changing and ways of paying attention to it, whether this is by theologists, historians, writers, architects or simply the individual person. It is a thoughtful and observant collection.”

Read the full review online at London Grip

Plato’s Peach by John Freeman

We are delighted to publish Plato’s Peach, the latest collection of poetry from John Freeman, and his first since winning the 2017 Wales Book of the Year Award.

Plato’s Peach is both a collection of individual poems which can be enjoyed in any order and an unfolding adventure which takes on fuller resonance if read in sequence. These poems combine vivid evocations of time and place with an ongoing meditation about life and death, nature and art, home and abroad, family and friendships. They are by turns – and sometimes all at once – moving, disturbing, consoling, funny, playful and profound. They invite the reader to participate, as one put it, in a joyful celebration of what it is to be sentient. 

It gives us great pleasure to publish this incredible new collection – find out more!

Reviews

“Considered, contemplative, and humane, this is a wonderful, wondrously disarming, collection” – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine, November 2021. Read the full review

“There is a wealth of enjoyment for the reader to discover in Plato’s Peach– the warmth, compassion and humour of the poems, delightful pen-portraits and anecdotes […] entertaining, varied and as always, perfectly crafted. It is also a book for our times. A book to console and cheer.” – Mandy Pannett, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, December 2021. Read Mandy’s in-depth review here.

“Conversational poetry is a thoughtful and insightful method for exploring and meditating on objects, events and relationships. John Freeman develops this style in impeccable prosody with fresh and interesting topics and engaging situations. He presents a journey of self-discovery that opens up unusual perspectives.” – Carla Scarano, London Grip, January 2022. Read the full review

“Reminiscences, family history and relationships, nature, music, and art are all examined minutely and compassionately. In everyday language, Freeman sets up scene after scene with characters in a series of narratives that open out into wider truths that provoke the reader into deeper thought. With poems that sound like conversation, the poet achieves an easeful philosophical view of his world that is memorable and incisive. […] A rich and varied collection: each poem is a journey of self-discovery, exploring the essence of experience, as if the writer is delving for truths in the act of writing. In a spirit of openness, the smallest moments are celebrated and held up to the light for the poet’s eye to look at closely.” – Rebecca Gethin, Wales Arts Review, January 2022. Read the full review

The Afterlife by Anthony Wilson

We are delighted to announce the publication of the fifth poetry collection by Anthony Wilson: The Afterlife

Anthony Wilson’s poems explore the borderline territory between grief and laughter, memory and forgetting, illness and health. His central subject is the way we live within family and community, questioning the roles we construct, both alone and with others. The Afterlife continues to pursue themes developed in his last collection with Worple, Riddance: mortality, mental health, the relation between body and soul, and how to live fully in the present moment.

“In these affecting, graceful poems, Anthony Wilson takes time to reflect on a life: ‘We cannot grasp what we have been given, or can give back’ and so offers his reader an essential book of (re)discovery, encounter and a true value of the present.” – Rebecca Goss

Find out more about The Afterlife