Supportive words

Below are a few examples of the comments I have received from some of the poets I admire who have placed me in recent competitions. 

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The Rialto judge Will Harris “Such an impressively sustained study of Alzheimer’s, which makes powerful use of a variety of forms. I found ‘Your Front Door’ a particularly affecting evocation of being “locked in / and locked out./ An alarm on both sides/ your wired sentry.” Little details – like the indented couplet in ‘The Avalon Plum Tree’ – carry such emotional heft. This is empathetic, “straight in the eye”, unsentimental but very moving writing."

 

Amy Wack, Editor and Judge of The Poetry Wales Pamphlet competition. "This new collection is beautifully empathetic, imaginative, and original. She joins her father on his journey through Alzheimer’s, his once keen code-breaking intelligence slowly eroded by the illness. She artfully evokes the specific impairments, and the way society deals with and sometimes denies the illness. More than merely memoir, this collection reaches out from the personal while remaining warmly within the family circle". 

 

Gwyneth Lewis, The Poetry Society judge ‘My Father in his Coracle’ portrays a father circling his own mind, as if in a coracle; an unforgettably tender description of the failing brain as a ‘boat-for-one’.

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