The poems in “New Wings” focus on many different kinds of beginnings. Drawn both from new poems as well as from two earlier collections, the book gives a fresh airing to the poetry of a talented writer whose work has been unavailable for many years. The ‘new wings’ in this wide-ranging selection can be the pages of a comic in a child’s eureka moment of learning to read or those of a woman transforming herself into flames to leap across the hemispheres like a forest fire. These are poems of living through and coming to terms with changes – sometimes momentous or traumatic – and moving on into the future. In them, the reader travels from Scotland to Stockholm, the Californian desert, New York, rural Pennsylvania, Venice, Constanta, the Blue Mountains, Sydney and Tyneside.
New Wings: Poems 1977-2007
Compelling and accomplished…a poet of unusual talent. –Bernard O’Donoghue, The Times Literary Supplement
Neither old-fashioned nor new-fangled, but abiding and spiritual. –Peter Porter, Observer
She displays a range of emotion and characterisation with both versatility and understanding…These are poems I will gladly return to again and again without fear of disappointment. –Richard Jones, Poetry Wales
Robyn Bolam 