On Friday 22nd November, Margaret Eddershaw will be launching her first full collection in London. Do come along if you can. It is at L’Osteria 57, Italian restaurant, 57 Grays Inn Rd. The event will start at 7.30 and will include readings by Margaret as well as guests: Katherine Gallagher, Agnes Meadows, Mick Wood and Gill McEvoy.
Catching Light is being published by Poetry Space and will be going into the Poetry Space bookshop this week and on general release in time for Christmas. As I will be attending the launch in London, I will be bringing back some special signed copies and will be offering them to “Friends of Poetry Space” very shortly.
With its striking cover design by award winning photographer, Eleanor Bennett (aged 17) and 60 vivid and moving poems by Margaret Eddershaw this first edition is set to sell out quickly. It has already had rave reviews:
Review: Catching Light, poetry collection by Margaret Eddershaw (Poetry Space 2013)
I have noticed the name ‘Margaret Eddershaw’ many times in poetry journals, always below a rather readable poem, so it was with some pleasure that I received a review copy of her first collection. Published by Poetry Space, Catching Light is divided into three sections: Brief Encounters, Home Thoughts, and Traveller Tales.
Margaret lives abroad and has travelled extensively, and she has focused her acute powers of observation to write poems both moving and funny in turns. Take, for example, the ‘restless humbug of zebras’ which become ‘barcodes on a lioness’s shopping’ in Waiting. Or Healing Hat in which a woman undergoing chemotherapy sews buttons, ‘jaunty reminders/of family narratives’, onto a grey wool beret, ‘each one persuades me/that it will hold things together,/knows what to do/if ever in a hole.’
She tackles subjects as diverse as the Cockle Pickers tragedy, the terracotta warriors of China, and the fall of a humble sparrow. Her subtlety shines in First Ballet Dress – I can only empathise with the mother of this five-year-old sewing, through her own grief, a tutu ‘to erase nightmares/of an accident.’
No matter where her poems are set, what shines through in each one is a strongly-held sense of our common humanity, and an awareness of the beauty of our shared world. Highly recommended.
Jo Waterworth
More reviews:
The poems in this collection twist colours and light and journeys into rich language and sensations and enable the reader to travel with Eddershaw into unknown places. Well crafted, controlled emotional writing deserves a wide readership. The poems shine on the page and help the reader to view the world differently.
– Wendy French
Margaret Eddershaw’s ‘Catching Light’ is a tour-de-force, multi-faceted and generous, and refreshingly original in her choice of image and juxtapositions.
Stylistically adventurous, Eddershaw takes us on journeys into other cultures, other voices, in poems resonant with feeling. This is a strong first collection distinguished by intelligence, toughness and lyrical grace.
– Katherine Gallagher
Eddershaw is a traveller. In this collection she invites us to journey with her as she seeks to understand otherness and playfully explores what is strange in the familiar and finds the familiar in the strange. The poems In ‘Catching Light’ concern themselves with all things foreign and yet ultimately return us deliciously and colourfully back to ourselves.
– Cheryl Moskowitz
