Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 67
ISBN: 9781781725542
Publication date: September 30, 2019
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 67
ISBN: 9781781725603
Publication date: September 30, 2019
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
A Second Whisper is a thoughtful and sensitive collection that reflects the changing identities of a woman: in motherhood, in widowhood, in friendship and grief. There are elegies to the loss in 2014 of her mentor and partner, the poet Dannie Abse which are a tribute to their deep friendship. There are also poems to her late husband who died in 2006 and for their children and for relationships from the author’s past in New York City and Denmark. The poems are both elegiac and celebratory: they move and change tone as the author travels to the past and negotiates through the geography of grief and feelings of displacement in London, and finally opens to her new life in the present.
Lynne Hjelmgaard
Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York City and lives in London. She taught Creative Art for children in various schools and institutions before she started writing poetry. She left the States in 1990 for the second time and has been living permanently in the UK since 2011. As a result of crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat with her husband she wrote the poems that were collected in Manhattan Sonnets (Redbeck Press, 2003) and was later released in CD format. After her husband died in 2006, she received a residency grant for the Danish Academy in Rome where she wrote poems that later appeared in her second collection The Ring (Shearsman Books, 2011). Her third poetry collection, A Boat Called Annalise, was published by Seren in 2016 and accounts for the journey Lynne took with her husband by boat across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Europe. Her new collection A Second Whisper is available now.
“A collection of thoughtful, inward-reaching poems, and we are privileged to be privy to them.”
Judy Darley, SkyLightRain
“This is Walford Davies’ fourth book from Seren and it is an ambitious project, combining narrative and lyric form (every poem is 16 lines long, in unrhymed couplets, most in four beat lines) … the choice of brief lyrics to develop what could well have been a novel, gives the reader some powerful moments.”
Martyn Crucefix
“A Second Whisper celebrates a poet who was clearly known to, and loved by, the writer; but the book is definitely not just a tribute to Dannie Abse. It is a collection of worth in its own right, with a voice and register that are very different from Abse’s. Hjelmgaard’s next book is likely to be a more obvious response to Abse’s poetry; and on the strength of this collection, we can look forward to that.”
Alwyn Marriage, London Grip
‘These poems express in lyrically controlled language and rhythms a quietly restless spirit of an “expert at loss”. They capture people, places and emotions in the voice of a twice-widowed seeker who is looking to settle or travel after losing a husband and a lover. The poet is content to follow “poetry and Eros” in her search. She mixes pathos with a wry humour. This is a finely tuned collection rooted in the real.’
Lawrence Scott
‘A Second Whisper is such a beautiful collection that I read it at one stretch. In language whose easy music sounds like thinking, these poems tell the story of a special late love after bereavement, as well as of loves of all kinds, and the very experience of being alive.’
Gillian Clarke
‘The two-thirds of these poems which are not about Abse might have constituted a ‘dying fall’, but this does not happen. There is something shrewd and almost ruthless about Hjelmgaard’s understanding of human longings and the limits that confines them.’
Artemis
‘The pictures that Hjelmgaard paints with words are more akin to pale watercolours rather than anything striking in oils, a quiet soundscape of inner thoughts and emotions, and it is this that gives them their strength.’
WriteOutLoud
