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The poems in Ticking deep map a beautiful but apparently empty strip of the South Wales coastline that looks across the Bristol Channel to Exmoor. The collection could be classified as nature writing, though the term, deep-mapping is a more accurate description of the eclectic subject matter: there are ghosts, suicides and ruins, as well as dung spiders, stone masons and insect apprehension. Many of the poems focus on the history and geography, archaeology and wild life of a two-mile stretch of the Welsh coastline. However, the mapping in Ticking is not only confined to the tangible or material, it includes the intangible, the dreams and hopes, imaginations and fears of its residents both in the past and in the present.

• Order Signed Copies direct from Ellie Rees  HERE

“Quietly, precisely, these poems stitch together several kinds of journey, though the seasons, through convalescence and a spirited response to one’s own ageing, through an intimately known locality, till the life of a person is linked with that of a place. Step by step, grounded in observation of the natural world, given lift by a delightful humour, they move from the confines of the house out through fields underlaid by history to the dizzying edge of the land and of geological time.”

• • • Philip Gross

“Ticking is a quietly stunning collection. You read the poems with a growing sense of excitement which turns to a feeling of eerie glee. The sense of a poet finding her voice and vision is palpable. A small quadrant of the Welsh coast is deeply observed and felt and excavated, its histories, dramas and secrets brought to light. Everything here seems to live, thrillingly and awfully, at once. The girl in the woman, the body in the cliff, the appetites and angers of the sea, time caught in a child’s question, the spectre of death at a wedding; here are the patterns of mortality in bent grasses, in the imprint of a bird on a window, in the wheeling of a moment, a day, a season. Wales has made another poet: her name is Ellie Rees.’”

• • • Horatio Clare

“A beautifully crafted and immediately engaging poetry collection based around the notion of a ‘deep mapping’…

There is also a sense of close observations, of objects and creatures wriggling free from metaphor, existing for their own sake. The pieces are full of lovely close observation of birds, insects and flowers, things which don’t stand for something but are something…

The poems themselves are immediately apprehensible and emotionally direct, although not without a rueful wit or sudden reversals of tone. Indeed the mood of the poetry constantly shifts like impressionistic light, but for all that, the feelings are rarely uncertain or ambiguous.”

• • • • Dr. Alan Bilton

About Ellie Rees

Ellie Rees is an internationally-minded, award-winning writer who writes across many genres including poetry, creative non-fiction and memoir. Her work is widely published in various journals including: New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Trestle Ties, The Lonely Crowd, Cabinet of Heed, and Black Bough Poems. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, both from Swansea University. Before becoming a writer, Ellie taught for many years at the United World College of the Atlantic, the first of the United World Colleges, situated in Wales. She was Head of Languages there and taught hundreds of idealistic, bright young people, many of whom have gone on to significant careers in literature.

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These poems look at the life of a GP from a doctor’s point of view.

They include a sequence of poems seen through the lens of the doctor described in John Berger’s book ‘A Fortunate Man’ and from the author’s own experiences from medical student to family doctor.

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“Judith Wozniak’s many years of empathetic observation as a GP provide the lens through which she views John Berger’s seminal work describing the life of a country doctor. Add to that her considerable skill as a poet in shaping this moving narrative into a formal sonnet sequence – creating a heroic crown for a heroic man. Elsewhere in this debut pamphlet, she relates her own experiences in medical practice in poems that are vital and compassionate, but never sentimental. The power of her work is to show us ourselves at our most vulnerable, but to find in those moments something redemptive and hopeful. ”

– Tamar Yoseloff

“Judith Wozniak skilfully portrays the working life of a doctor, and how that life operates outside the hospital and its consulting rooms. In these poems we are taken deep within the community and inside patients’ homes. What the doctor witnesses can be harrowing. A woman tries to escape domestic violence; a vulnerable child navigates a day in school ‘clinging to loose scuffed shoes with your toes’; family members are pushed to their limits caring for relatives, but there is life-affirming stuff here too. True bonds are formed between doctor and patient, as ‘secrets and fears’ are disclosed. The doctor may watch ‘from the edge of things’ but will, without question, put the patient first and continue to ‘think of them in the quiet of the night.’ ”

– Rebecca Goss

About Judith Wozniak

Judith Wozniak spent most of her working life as a General Practitioner. In the later stages of her career she taught trainee GPs. She began writing after retirement and attended courses at Arvon and The Poetry School. It was the Routes into Poetry course at the Poetry School with poet and inspirational teacher Tamar Yoseloff that led her to study for an MA in Writing Poetry at the Poetry School and Newcastle University.

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• Paperback : 98 pages
• ISBN-10 : 1913499316
• ISBN-13 : 978-1913499310
• Product Dimensions : 14.81 x 0.58 x 21.01 cm
• Buy a Signed Copy Direct from Gaynor Kane HERE
• Order from Amazon HERE

“In the opening poem to Gaynor Kane’s ‘Venus in Pink Marble she describes her poems as being held in ‘fragile, translucent hulls’ that dissolve ‘before they reach the skyline’. In doing so she undersells her collection. ‘Venus in Pink Marble’ is packed with vibrant, resonant poetry that will live long in the consciousness of this reader.

The collection is divided into three parts. The first part ‘The Lock’ explores the present and past history of her homeland and its impact upon the writer and its people. She describes an urban landscape of industrial decay: Belfast’s thriving and prosperous industry is no more leaving ‘Industrial bones in the landscape’ and ‘Stagnant water’s slow-flow framework/where once it was dynamic’ (‘Echoes’). Its fragility is beautifully captured in her account of how a rat brought the city’s transport system to a halt by chewing through a cable in ‘Dead Short on the System, Belfast, 1923’. The community Kane describes, however, is not cowed. She celebrates its courage and its refusal to accept hardship and oppression in poems such as:  ‘Annadale, 22^nd April 1914’, ‘Domestic Help’ and ‘Christmas Morning, Carrowdore, 1870’. She commemorates its fight for social justice as she has little faith in those in power to address the issues her community faces: in ‘Belfast Moon, January 2017’ she describes ‘dark/powers colliding/integrity/compromised’ and in ‘Election day, 12^th December 2019’ she characterises politicians as looking ‘down from on high’ on ‘the starving and the shivering’ and in the last stanza of the poem tellingly juxtaposes a cold, homeless man looking for shelter against ‘the warm hands scooping handfuls of ballot-paper-snow’.

In the second part ‘Letter to Me’, the focus of the collection turns to domestic life with poems full of warmth and tenderness.  Here she explores close relationships and memories. Familiar objects, such as a barometer, are invested with the affections she feels for their owners; she invokes the presence of a friend through a recipe of sensory details; family rituals, such as lighting the fire and pulling a wishbone, are lovingly described so that we share their significance; and we travel with her on family holidays experiencing the joy in her memories. This is not rose-tinted nostalgia, however: she explores more difficult moments too. She movingly describes her first contact with death and grief in ‘The first time I saw him cry’ and in ‘Trussed’ she tells of the alienation, loneliness and physical suffering  of growing up with a club-foot; a poem with the stunning lines ‘my mother transformed to woodworker/as if steam-bending a strip of tear-soaked birch’.

In the third section ‘A Life Drawn’ Kane’s perspective turns outwards again: the poems in this section are inspired by works of art and other artefacts. Two poems that particularly caught my attention were responses to the work of visual artists. In these poems Kane uses the pictures as springboards for her own narratives. In ‘A Life Drawn’ she puts herself in the place of Leonardo Da Vinci’s nude model, vividly realizing the oppressiveness of the relationship between model and artist: ‘I want to course/like a hare cross a meadow but I am silent/sculpture still; running will not feed my family’. Later in the poem he invades her personal space, she feels ‘his breath on what he calls/my scapula’ and he ‘traces the tendon on my wrist’. In the second poem, ‘American Gothic’, she reflects again on the nature of a relationship, this time between the man and woman portrayed in the painting. She projects forward, five weeks later, when the woman, unable to bear his repression of her any longer, takes revenge and murders him with his own pitchfork.  There is a darker tone here that is to be found in other poems in this section that contrasts so effectively with the lighter tone of the poems in ‘Letter to Me’.

Carol Ann Duffy writing about her inspiration for poetry says: ‘You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart”. Her words sum up the inspiration for this fine collection by a mature poet at the height of her powers. A must autumn read!”

• Nigel Kent, Author of Saudade and Psychopathogen

2021 marks the 700^th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. These 21 prose poems were written in a three-way conversation with Dante, who brought his experience of Purgatory to bear as he led us through this era in which we, too, find ourselves trudging an upward spiral with only hope to sustain us. As in his celebrated journey, we encountered trials and obstacles to overcome and lessons to learn, and his guidance was invaluable. We hoped that he would show us Paradise but, like his Roman predecessor, he could only take us so far, leaving us with Virgil’s valediction: You have seen the temporary fire and the eternal fire; you have reached the place past which my powers cannot see. The next step is ours to choose.

You Can Order Signed Copies HERE

“The pandemic is our purgatory in these prose poems, strewn with the detritus of death and life, torment and beauty. Is there a way forward? As we learn from Dante at the very heart of his poem, the next step is ours to choose.”

– Laurie Shepard, Associate Professor of Italian, Boston College

“Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick bring Dante’s themes and images brilliantly to bear on our Covid era, in prose poems whose imaginative flights are superbly controlled – and philosophically purposed. Essential reading in this Dante 700th anniversary year.”

– Paul Munden, poet and Editor of Divining Dante

“A thick soup of allegories that become possible oxymorons in that non-linear sea that is our experience in this life. Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick have managed to rework Dante’s poetic material, with its immense specific weight, and to translate it into a very personal style: rich, vivid and figurative. Despite the thread of a bobbin run by the devil, despite the thin finger that urges us into the labyrinth, and despite the roads blocked by fallen stars and fallen angels, there is a very strong need to dress our bodies with a True – albeit not real – skin that shows us the way.”

– Santy Masciarò, Dante Society London

About Amina Alyal

AMINA ALYAL has published poetry collections The Ordinariness of Parrots (Stairwell Books 2015) and Season of Myths (Wordspace at Indigo Dreams 2016), and has appeared in a number of journals and magazines, including The House in the Forest (Hedgehog Poetry Press 2020). She teaches Creative Writing and English at Leeds Trinity University and has also published scholarly research, specialising in Renaissance and Victorian literature.  She was editor of Dream Catcher Magazine in 2020.

About Oz Hardwick

OZ HARDWICK has published nine full poetry collections and chapbooks, most recently Wolf Planet (Hedgehog, 2020), as well as countless individual poems in journals and anthologies. He has performed and held residencies in the UK, US, Europe and Australia. He teaches Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University and has also published widely on medieval art and literature, and on medievalism.

Amina and Oz are members of the group The Forgotten Works with musician Karl Baxter, performing music and poetry shows at a number of festivals, including online, since 2018.

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• ISBN: 978-1913499266
• Pages: 34
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• Order signed copies direct from Damien at his web site HERE

“Just occasionally you come across a voice in poetry that is distinctive and unique. Damien Donnelly in his first collection ‘Eat the Storms’ is exactly that.

The world in Donnelly’s poems is a chaotic and turbulent place with no defining truth or reality. Life is problematic and alienating. Humankind has lost its way and the individual is powerless and adrift: ‘I have drowned more, before, on quiet corners, in safe seats,/in non-comforting crowds; dozens all searching/for their own spotlight in place of a single soul.’ One must find one’s own way and to do this one must discover who one is and where one belongs. As a consequence in many of the poems we find Donnelly withdrawing into himself (‘absorbing, reflecting, meditating‘), searching for meaning and questioning ‘creation/and (his) position within it’.  He is ‘looking/to find a new shape.’  This is no easy task. In the past he has ducked the challenge, ‘taken flight’, and pretended to be what he is not: ‘stilled the air with performances; shy boy/in the spotlight singing songs he can’t quite/find the notes for, or the right to call his own.‘ So difficult is it to find the answers he is seeking, he wonders if ‘the blind can see better’ than him. Yet he persists: trying to make sense of his past, his relationships and his childhood to resolve unsettled issues, such as the relationship with his father, in the deeply moving ‘Tattered Brown Trousers’.

The poems enact this struggle, yet there is a sustaining optimism: ‘We can’t all be angels but we can rise upon the air we eat/the touch we have tasted, the flesh we have crept from, swept upon,//found a fondness for.’ In the final poem of this short collection he reminds us that ‘black is only a shadow’ and he exhorts us to ‘Come catch the colour, catch the kisses/catch the life racing by in taxis, on trains/under starry night waiting for us to paint them/Behold how much there is to love/to let go of, to learn from.‘

Donnelly’s poetry is beautifully written and dense with vivid imagery, sometimes synesthetic and sometimes surreal. It demands to be read aloud and as one does a kaleidoscope of colour illuminates each page, for these are poems that play on the cultural associations of colours, imbuing them with personal significance and resonance.

This is a writer of real talent, whose first pamphlet rewards reading, reading again and reading again.”

• Nigel Kent, Author of Saudade and  Psychopathogen