Cinnamon Press – serie

Combining poetry with the long essay ‘Thirty Ways of Looking at the Sea’, which charts her involvement with the Marine Conservation Society as resident poet as they launched an appeal to tackle the threats facing thirty marine species, Words the Turtle Taught Me sees Susan Richardson writing at the height of her powers as a poet, an ecological campaigner and as a writer about the process of composing inventive, compelling poems.

A young girl discovers that riding a bike is more than simply learning balance…A village is commandeered by the army for target practice…A drive south for the summer becomes a journey through language to an inner place…An unassuming young man is driven to murder…Weaving together compassion and acute observation with a fine ear for the nuance of identity and nationality, Isabelle Llasera’s debut short story collection is serious, humorous, tragic and inspiring by turns. Sometimes intimate, sometimes cast against broader backdrops, these stories show that the private and personal are always present. Smog demonstrates, time and again, that the big things in our lives are always less important than our fundamental humanity.

Responding to the fragile borders between climate change and mental health to evolve into conversations around trauma, change, care and the natural world, The Chalk Butterfly explores images of home and the paradoxes around our simultaneous care and un-care for nature and language. Working backwards through the butterfly’s life cycle, each phase examines the tipping points, vanishing or fractured boundaries between our environments (internal and external), reflecting on the damaging ways we step on both the earth and humanity. Yet in these precise, exquisitely realised prose poems there is also celebration of the overwhelming urge to adapt and help life thrive, a turning away from the despair that would accept we might ‘just about manage’ or even fail in favour of moments of transformation.

In this exquisite pamphlet, grief is on every page, yet there is not a maudlin word. The language is clear and vivid, the memories accessible and, despite the emotional weight of loss explored, there is light and joy here. A collection as freighted with gratitude as sorrow. G W Colkitto is a maven of control of form and line, with the ability to say only what is needed and no more, and in If you want to know her, such craft opens spaces that allow the reader to immerse in the poems, feel deeply and leave with grace. An outstanding collection — poignant and true.

To interrogate darkness at this moment in history is not only timely, but vital and Bonnie Thurston does it with an honesty and precision that holds our attention. From the darkness of a melancholic disposition to darkness that shelters us safely, from sleepless nights and their moons to trusting in the return of the light on the darkest day and longest night, these pieces are poised, precise, full of sensory details, insightful and shot through with hope. There is fear and grief here, but it will not have the last word.

The Dolls’ House Maker’s Room sits in a house of tools and memories, the tools as much metaphors as objects, the memories laden with objects and images, with the places and events that shape what we know and what we don’t. A maven of gentle surprise, Robin Thomas’ language is supple, generous and deeply reflective; his observations sharp, quick-witted and beautifully controlled. There is a signature breadth of reference in these poems — travel, film, the absurdities of life and human history, art, mortality, loss — united by a confident, distinctive, humane voice.bats foxes planes clouds lives made and unmade revolutions tea and cake a stately moon eternal stars I wake. It’s day. You’re still not here. (from ‘Wake’)

In this extraordinary debut collection, Kathleen Bridget Eva O’Hanlon dives deeply into a personal history that holds a mirror up to all the ways we piece together a lifetime of memories to weave a story of our many connected selves. Rich in references to literature, history, myth and culture, the poetry here remains accessible and resonant, clear-eyed, acutely observant and bristling with intelligent humour.We are reminded of the ways fragments of our pasts become defining moments – the casual remark to a child over a Crunchie bar that remains brutally clear decades later, the act of undemonstrative kindness that makes a child feel seen and valued in the simple gift of a wooden butter curler, the radical grandmother who ‘called a penis, a penis’, the life events and ordinary days that mark us – from almost marrying Casanova to childbirth, from our hungry ghosts to the way insomnia blurs into vision, threading loss and memory. It’s late and getting later, but still there is wit and life, still there is a legacy to leave and hope to insist on, memories that reshape both past and future. Still there is a credo – in the ‘great and final roar that is to come’ and in love.

In a tight sequence of 33 poems, In the Shadow of the Yew, John Barnie leads us through ‘the cemetery of hopes’ (Conrad). A layered monologue in a distinctive voice that is incisive and deeply questioning, Barnie asks whether the suffering of humanity and the suffering we inflict renders our species a curse. ‘...better than both / is the one who has never been born, / who has not seen the evil / that is done under the sun.’ says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and Barnie sits in a long line of writers who consider that the natural world would be better off without us. There’s a note of Leopardi, Hardy, Beckett, Cioran and, above all, Robinson Jeffers in this unflinching collection, with a tone that builds on Jeffers’s The Double Axe and its philosophy of inhumanism.And yet, at the heart of this collection, is tenderness and compassion. Woven through poems that refuse to turn away from war and torture, starvation, greed, injustice and suffering, there are glimpses of a childhood by the banks of the Usk, fragments of the stories of friends and loved ones and homage to writers who have come before the poet. And there is a litany of extinct flora and fauna interspersed through the sequence as well as lines mourning so much loss:six hundred million birds have disappeared from Europe what tonnage is that how many hearts pattering faster than rain on a canopy of leavesAt heart there is a delight in the world that humanity is laying waste to, a yearning for life that is otherwise and the repeated cry: What do we do now?

In October 2020, as new lock downs were implemented, Jan Fortune moved from a beloved home of twenty years in North Wales to a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finistère. Isolated during lockdowns, facing major unforeseen house renovations, illness and bereavement, she was also training as a herbalist while juggling work.Constantly, she asked herself: What are you doing here?How had a moment in a church gazing at a stained glass window as a four-year-old, a friendship between two girls who role-played their way through seven years as people from 10th century Moorish Spain, a thirty-one year volatile marriage, work-place assaults, a heart-changing encounter with herbalism and a new relationship led to this place in the seventh decade of life?At the heart's farthest edge unravels a series of cusp moments so slight they might have vanished unnoticed, yet in retrospect make sense of following a call to a forest in a new land and language, exploring herbalism, creativity and the ways in which we might live a small life well in this beautiful, wounded world.Friendship, motherhood, love, making art and the natural world collide with the times we live in to produce a love letter to moments that persist across years, shining with joy or the sheen of tears, revealing how our deepest stories matter.

Material Witness, Edward Ragg's sixth collection, bears witness to all manner of materials: from botany, bower birds, diving bell spiders, rock formations and coral reefs to a Nazi-stamped photo of the poet’s mother as well as Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Las Meninas paintings of Velázquez and Picasso. In three sections — ‘Scenes’, ‘Acts’, ‘Aftermaths’ — Material Witness reveals an interlinking architecture, constructing a poetry profoundly wedded to the physical universe and variously concerned with love, family history, the natural world, even the simple act of stirring a cup of tea. This is a poetry that conjures in all senses ‘the strange companionship of materials’.

Where are my Window Songs? has not a word out of place. The phrases are limpid and shimmer with sensory details so that we encounter places, creatures and the persona of the poet as though in the flesh, meaning and metaphor held in the thingness of this carefully and beautifully drawn world. The natural world, memory, how we journey through life, find form in language that is apparently simple but always holds layers and depths. The poetry here is immersive and questioning, elegant and always perspective-altering, gently powerful, and bears reading again and again.Patricia Helen Wooldridge is the winner of the 2024, Rubery Book Award for best poetry book, a twice winner of the Cinnamon Literature Award and also won the Cinnamon pamphlet award. In Where are my Window Songs? she is writing at the height of her power.

Liliana Pasterska is the maven of finding emotional depth in the detail of the everyday. In Brontë Journey we are invited to walk alongside a love story, one that is sundered by loss, yet shines all the more brightly for that.The language is clear and precise. The places resonate with the beauty and grief that unfold in the personal story of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nichols at the heart of the collection. The voices of her subjects carry across time, not an act of ventriloquism, but of empathy and immersion. And if for Arthur, grieving as he leaves Yorkshire six years after Charlotte’s early and sudden death, “Roadside fuchsia will greet him / as if nothing had passed.”, the clue is in the ‘as if’. For so much has passed and this exquisite collection has allowed us in, invited us to share a moment with creatures whose lives still touch us.An elegant, heart-stopping collection.

As the global ecological crises deepens, fire and water, elements that bring warmth, life, become increasingly threatening as we hold our breath, the earth burning and drowning. In Becoming Wetland Yvonne Baker dives into the existential menace of a world whose waters have lost rhythm and balance. But we are never in the realm of the didactic. This watery world is one of sorrow and questions, of images so precise and clear we feel them as our own. With her gift for making connections, between heart and world, between events and objects that could go unnoticed and the ripples of their impact, Yvonne Baker skilfully takes us ‘into the waters / of the reedbed as it sinks into darkness’ where we find the lost objects of ordinary, inundated lives. And in a central sequence we move forward through time, looking back on ourselves through the eyes of those still to be born to find, ‘a reminder of the years when we still had hope.’ But back in the present, that hope has not failed, if only we will listen and accept the blessing on those of us, all of us, ‘caught / between the ochre heat, the black rain.’ Timely, poignant and beautiful, from a poet whose writing warns, comforts and invites us to feel deeply.

The persona that moves through Alone with Seoul is a shadow, an observer in two foreign lands—South Korea, where the poet is an incomer, and the land of love, from which the poet has stepped aside. There are griefs here that run deep and there is the hard nugget of knowing survival. There is the unflinching honesty that absence, pain and the drama it brings can become a comforting place to hide, that giving these up is a deeper and different loss, one that may allow love to arrive again one day:not as tempest, not as fire to burn me clean, but as quiet, steady light.Silence and solitude, the temptations of self-destruction and the ways we navigate an often alienating world thread through poems that are exquisitely pared to the essentials of a lucid image and a perfect phrase. Poems that are enhanced by fragments of translation into South Korean. A distinctive, elegant debut.

Hatched in the UK in August 2017, Sparky is a captive-bred barn owl. Raised by humans, living with them, she accepts them as essential to her life, benefiting from the security they can provide, but suffering under the uncertainty they can inflict.And here, thanks to her current human, t-raay-cee, Sparky recounts her unique story. By turns heart warming and disturbing, Sparky offers an owl’s-eye view of her relationship with her human mates and her search for a special human to bond with lifelong.A mesmerising and ambitious work that crosses genres and raises important questions about how we can connect deeply with the more-than-human world.

When Nancy and Charles fly from Scotland to visit their daughter Lottie and her family in New Zealand, Nancy finds herself making an odd decision while jet lagged. It is a decision that will haunt her. Why does the mysterious Hunter harass her daughter, a doctor, for medical help but resist going to the clinic? What is the connection between Stacey, Lottie’s new receptionist, and Hunter?The benign climate and beauty of Hawke’s Bay is welcoming, but at every turn Nancy realises that the pleasures of grandparenting distant family are riddled with frustrations. And on this trip, it’s not only the risks of trying and sometimes failing to understand the culture that has become ‘home’ to adult children, but the deeper danger of missed signals when things are truly awry.On a final weekend of beach fun in the remote area of Mahia, things may become clearer, but also more deadly and Nancy must make decisions that will leave her with unanswered questions.

Karen has taken photographs since she was nine, showing off her Anglo-Norwegian lifestyle, and has found her most enthusiastic audience yet: the mature student, Steven.And what better way to escape their problems than go on a student-exchange to an art school in Oslo? But Karen’s real problem is something she can’t admit, even to herself. What caused her Norwegian grandmother to grow distant towards her, and her mother to stay silent?Ranging from Norwich to the north of Norway, White Space is a story of the destructive power of denial, and the need for identity. As Steven and Karen make art, will they dig deep enough to face the truth about themselves? Will they ever come to terms with the consequences of their past?

Bristol, 1990. The underground acid house scene is hitting the headlines. Architect Anna Weatherby is grieving for her fiancé, who died after taking ecstasy at a rave. While cycling to see her bereavement counsellor, she is injured in a road accident.Billy, her rescuer that fateful day, could just be the perfect new boyfriend. However, as she is drawn into his life, she realises he is hiding something from her.On a weekend away, hidden secrets emerge which connect them in ways they couldn’t have imagined. And they both find themselves fighting to keep their lives from spiralling out of control.

A DREADFUL CHOICE WITH DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCESFriends involved in a fertility treatment pact fear the impossible choices of the past have caught up with them.Deftly exploring the complexities of 1980s fertility treatment, still in its infancy, The Choice delves into the human consequences of infertility and surrogacy in a landscape of public outcry and rapidly changing legislation. Grief, loss and betrayal leave those involved at risk from the law, whilst the emotional fall-out plays out over three decades in this subtle, immersive and compassionate story. As parents, surrogates, doctors and family struggle to hide or reveal the truth to the now adult children, the stakes are raised and questions multiply.Who are Sarah and Suzette’s parents? What does the future hold for those trapped by the past?The second book in The Identity Thieves series and a compelling follow-up to The Search, The Choice holds a mirror up to how we construct identity when nothing we believed is true.

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.

In Transience, Nick Jones moves across the themes that touch on our fragility and mortality. What do we really believe? How do we live as creatures in time, juggling fate and history? How do we navigate the best and worst of human impact on the earth and one another?Transience touches everything and none of us escape without loss. And yet at the heart of it all, love remains, conjured here with poignant elegance and with thanks for all that has been. An expansive, tender collection.

For Caitlin Bailey the past has been far from easy. Living in the shadows of her mother’s mental illness, she has been brought up in Dublin by her Aunt Milla. Now aged 22 and with her mother back home, Caitlin is escaping to London with her artist boyfriend Fitz to live life on her own terms. What does she want? Who can she be?The emerging art scene of early ’90s London brings a job as a gallery assistant and exciting new friends but intrusive memories of her childhood haunt Caitlin’s nights. And then Fitz leaves to work in Rye — it’s temporary but feels like another abandonment. What follows will change everything.A love story in which past and present reverberate, Three Flowers asks what we need to hold and what we need to let go in order to love and live well.

12-year-old Livia flees her forced marriage in Genoa for glamorous Florence and an affair with Don Giovanni de’ Medici, son of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.To protect Livia from the Medicis’ hostility, they move to Venice. They succeed in having Livia’s first marriage annulled, get married and have a son.But the Medicis will stop at nothing.Constructed through fragments and intense, eloquent letters that only recently surfaced. Love in the time of the Medici inhabits the spaces between what is recorded and what is imagined. A story with the magnitude and tragedy of that of Abelard and Héloïse.

Arriving in Los Angeles intent on donating her kidney to an unwell friend, She contemplates the powerful magnetism of California. Like the gold-diggers, the health-seekers and the movie moguls before her, She had come to the state as a young woman to seek her fortune in ‘the industry’, but her dreams were not fulfilled.What had become of the men who did not strike gold, those who could not be cured of their ailments, the ones who did not find fame? Where are the failures? Where are the women like her?Before leaving London, her brother had said, “Most people would give an arm and a leg for a month in LA to revisit their youth. You’re willing to give a kidney.” Perhaps he was right. There are no heroes.In the lounge of a luxury hotel, observing the clientele, She asks: Why are they so lucky? Why are they so worthy? Why haven’t they offered their kidneys, spare bedrooms or a helping hand to the poor, the sick and the needy?There is an opportunity for karmic restoration here.

A poetry collection exploring the world of the Romani.

Global politics, modern art and street protest collide in this high-spirited thriller featuring a one-of-a-kind narrator.

A daughter uncovers the truth behind her mother's life in a kibbutz on the bank of the River Jordan in the 1970s.

These vital vignettes of a post-War Bedfordshire childhood are delivered to us through rich recurrences and strange isolations of character. — Mario Petrucci