I’m really excited that we have Sharon Larkin’s collection ‘Dualities’ now available for you to pre-order. Sharon is a stunning poet and this is a collection quite like nothing else we’re reading at the moment, looking at partnerships as a concept from every angle.
As Sharon says, partnerships are demanding. Reconciling two sets of expectations, hopes, ambitions, desires and demands is an exacting business. The ideal is surely a mutually agreed balance between give and take, rights and compromises, constraints and freedoms. Any intrusion into a partnership is capable of challenging it, rocking it, even destroying it … but mutual recognition of a greater good can seal and cement a relationship. With mutual well-being as an agreed aim, supported by good humour, grace and forgiveness, individuals might grow the kind of partnership that becomes something more than both of them, something greater than they might have imagined.
Oz Hardwick (Professor of English, Programme Leader for Postgraduate Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University) has written:
“There’s a lot to be said for / being an outsider inside,” and Sharon Larkin’s perceptive collection perfectly explores the dualities of being a stranger in one’s social and personal spheres, as well as in one’s own body. The poems explore the paradoxical intensity of dissociation, with delicate touches of domestic surrealism and scorched-black wit chalking the outline of desire, deception, and a secular redemption of sorts. This is uneasy reading, full of the naked-edged truth that lies unseen beneath so many magnolia-painted lives.”
Angela France (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Gloucestershire):
“Sharon Larkin is a keen photographer and her trained eye is evident in this collection; not only in the precise, sensory, detail but also in the care she takes with the angle of approach for each poem. The poems cover a range of themes but the Dualities of the title is evident throughout, always subtle and often in the form of a surprising twist which delighted me as a reader. Sometimes it is a line, other times a single word which re-focuses the whole poem such as in ‘Mismatch’, where the word ‘proprietorial’ in the last line turns tender care to something else entirely.”
Pat Edwards (Welshpool Poetry Festival) has written:
“This is both a romp and a skirmish, a disturbing dream and a garden of delights. Larkin forces us to encounter what we might call love, lust, longing, and examine these stormy forces through all the stages of life. Honest, sometimes cynical, the poems explore the sparks, flames and embers that burn us all. Perhaps the most stark warning concerns times in our lives we might compare with dusk, when our vision is not always clear, and we “must chance a snarl” in order to discern dog from wolf.”
As ever, we want you to read our books and totally encourage you to support our poets by buying their work directly from them and Sharon has ‘Dualities’ listed on her web site HERE
As a bonus, if you buy this direct from Sharon in the next fortnight, you will also be eligible for a FREE ENTRY to any one of our competitions.
But you need to be quick.
To enter the competition, by the 7th of October 2020 you need to:
- Buy ‘Dualities’ direct from Sharon Larkin HERE
- Email your Competition entry along with the payment receipt to the email address on the relevant competition page.
It is as simple as that.
About Sharon Larkin
- Sharon Larkin’s Interned at the Food Factory was published by Indigo Dreams in 2019. Her poems have been anthologised by Cinnamon Press, Eyewear Publishing, Smokestack Books and more, and have been published in magazines including Magma, Prole and Obsessed with Pipework, and in e-zines eg Ink Sweat & Tears, Atrium and Amaryllis.
Sharon is Gloucestershire’s Stanza Representative and runs poetry events in Cheltenham. As Eithon Bridge Publications, she publishes anthologies eg All a Cat Can Be (2018), Invisible Zoos (2019) and Poetry from Gloucestershire (2020). Sharon also runs the Good Dadhood on-line poetry project and is passionate about Wales, photography and the natural world.
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- sharonlarkinjones.com
- gooddadhood.com
- eithonbridge.com
- Title: Dualities
- ISBN: 978-1913499273
- Pages: 54
- Order from Amazon HERE
- Order signed and annotated copies direct from Sharon at her web site HERE
I am looking forward to reading Sharon Larkin’s ‘Dualities’.
Thanks for the information about the competition too.
Best wishes,
John Herington