Poetry
Shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2020
Winner of the Mslexia/Poetry Book Society Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2019
Bloodlines is an exploration of Sarah Wimbush’s own Gypsy/Traveller heritage, a journey made by piecing together fragments of distant stories and a scattered language. Along the way, we meet people who are ‘tethered to the seasons’; voices that reverberate with a sense of family and resilience, and always with that constant wonder of being part of something colourful, untamed and rare.
Sarah Wimbush
Sarah Wimbush’s Mslexia prize-winning pamphlet Bloodlines (Seren 2020) was shortlisted in the Michael Marks Awards. She was also a winner in The Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition 2020 with The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop 2021). A recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, she comes from Doncaster and lives in Leeds.
Bloodlines is available now.
“Sarah Wimbush’s award winning pamphlet is a rich reflection on the history of Gypsy travellers … Bloodlines is a proud retelling of a family chronicle, a Gypsy way of life that appears rooted in a more agricultural past, with the circle of seasons and farm work shaping a family life that is always on the move. Wimbush takes us into this world with great skill, and without sentimentality.”
Rennie Halstead, The Poetry Shed
“Sarah Wimbush won the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2019 with this slim yet seductively insidious collection. Wimbush’s verses creep in under collar and cuff, sending shivers across your scalp … Sensuous, textured and riddled through with landscapes, these are poems that will bring you to your door to reconvene with seasons.”
Judy Darley, SkyLightRain
“The incredible new pamphlet Bloodlines … is about movement and transformation, interwoven with the change of the seasons. It is a poetry collection exploring Wimbush’s Gypsy/Traveller heritage, a journey through marshes and reed beds, past flames and rivers; a voyage from sunrise until twilight.”
The Isolation Book Club
‘..an intriguing focus on language and identity.’
Rachel Carney, Created to Read
‘A thrilling debut that kept me outdoors in the grassy world of communal lives. I love the formal dazzle and linguistic dare that spoke of defiance, survival and utter joy.’
Daljit Nagra
‘Bloodlines asserts Carroty Kate, our Jud and Lizzie’s right to have their mother tongue placed among the voices of poetry.’
Stuart Pickford
‘Sarah Wimbush’s exciting poetry has that rare ring of authenticity. Her language brings to life a lost world with startling vividness. It is the real thing.’
Carole Bromley
‘There is a Romany saying, We are all one: all who are with us are ourselves; Sarah Wimbush’s collection draws us into the world of Travellers with linguistic panache and delight.’
David Morley
‘In Bloodlines Sarah Wimbush explores her Gypsy and Traveller heritage, conjuring the travelling life of the past, its characters, sights and sounds, and savouring its flavours and vocabulary in earthy and evocative verse.’
The TLS
