Twenty years ago, Bruce Ackerley won Cinnamon Press’s inaugural poetry collection prize with his debut, Sound of Mountain, of which RV Bailey wrote: ‘finely crafted, lyrical and spare… with a musical ear for landscape and relationships. An interesting, individual voice, he writes with power and sensitivity.’In Lightship, Ackerley now brings together his finest writing from two decades, the voice confident and supple with a deepened lyricism and an acute sense of what to say, and what not to say, each poem is a honed gem—poised and resonant. Ranging across the natural and supernatural, the solace and joys of art, film and music, love, grief and sexuality, and the vicissitudes of mental health, Lightship is both an internal record and a reaching out. A moving, distinctive pièce de résistance.
