It’s here…Rose’s new book: Notes From a Bright Field – the poems

Rose Cook’s Notes From a Bright Field is ‘a single quiet path, in and out’, capturing the transitory beauties of the everyday: a mother’s ashes imagined as ‘Lux flakes’; the ‘fruit-gummed glass’ of a cathedral. Where the poems’ themes are of nature, loss and the spiritual, these are grounded in concrete imagery like ‘the clack-clack of the shell and the bones’.

Notes from a Bright Field costs £8.00 plus £2.00 p&p, £16.00 for two copies (p&p free) available from this website, Cultured Llama, your local bookshop or Amazon

Paperback; 104pp;  203×172 mm; 978-0-9568921-9-5; July 2013; Cultured Llama; £8.00    http://www.culturedllama.co.uk

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Rose Cook is one of the South-West’s best loved poets, having performed extensively in venues such as the Soho Theatre in London, the Bristol Poetry Festival and Dartington’s Ways With Words Literature Festival, as well as a variety of local poetry events. She is an Apples & Snakes poet and has appeared at the North Devon Festival in Barnstaple, Plymouth’s Barbican theatre, Exeter Phoenix’s Text Festival and a Peterloo Poets event in Cornwall.

Rose co-founded the popular Devon poetry and performance forum One Night Stanza, as well as poetry performance group Dangerous Cardigans. Her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio Devon and local SoundArt radio.

She has run writing workshops with older people and offers poems for reading aloud at the Totnes Memory Cafe.

Previous poetry books are Everyday Festival published by HappenStance Press (2009) and Taking Flight published by Oversteps Books (2009).

http://www.rosecook.wordpress.com

In their transparency and deceptive simplicity Rose Cook’s poems reveal pure and hidden depths in nature, memory and loss, celebrating and questioning the fragility of everyday interactions. These are indeed poems for people ‘who juggle [their] lives’, insisting in their gratitude that we ‘be still sometimes’. To read Notes From a Bright Field is to be renewed in body, mind and spirit.

Anthony Wilson

Rose Cook’s poems are often poignant, reflecting the many variables of ordinary lives, but always with a lightness of touch, an acceptance of what it is to be human.

A collection fluid and sincere, the poems are wide ranging, sometimes painterly, sometimes with a wonderful down-to-earth diction and a singular inwardness that delights.

Denise McSheehy

 

The Way Freedoms are Dreamt

I have purple hair in the dream,

purple hair, and I am standing

in full sun, tipping my head back.

This is familiar,

the way strange is familiar.

 

One of these crow-flecked days,

I will run fast down the road

right into the sea. Leave behind

the houses, with their pockets of dust,

their sleeping cats, the people with their

so-many different faces and needs.

 

No cupboards, no lists,

nothing to remember at all,

just the roar of it to absorb,

the echo and rumble that keep

larger time than a clock,

the wash that cleans to the bones.

 

Only the turn of waves, the spread

of spilt cream, the heave and arch,

getting ready to dive.

 

 by Rose Cook from ‘Running Before the Wind’ a new anthology of poems about the sea edited by Joy Howard, published by Grey Hen Press

 Available direct from Grey Hen Press    ISBN 978-0-9552952-9-4   £12 + p&p

 

‘A wind-shaken, salt-laden, heartload of poems by women, and not a dead fish among them. I have lived within sight of the sea all my life, and this is the most enjoyable anthology I have read on this subject’. Gillian Clarke