Thank you very much for anyone who has reviewed, recommended, my earlier poetry collections and pamphlets, and for those who have reviewed my latest poetry collections.
The Skin - Flarestack Pubs. ed. Charles Johnson
Passio - Flarestack Pubs. ed. Charles Johnson
A Wing and a Prayer - Swarthmoor Hall Press
The Other Side of the Bridge - Indigo Dreams, ed. Ronnie Goodyer
Salt Road - Indigo Dreams, ed. Ronnie Goodyer
Passing Through - Indigo Dreams, ed. Ronnie Goodyer
GERALDINE GREEN – REVIEWS:
“My
assignment was to review only three from the 20-odd small press publications
sent to me, but before signing off, let me recommend a small blue booklet
titled The Skin by Geraldine Green, from Flarestack Publishing in Birmingham. Green’s gift for poetry is naïve – or perhaps
the right word is natural – in a way I would have thought impossible these
days. Though she writes in free forms,
her poems kept reminding me of WH Davies’.
She writes a good deal about angels (a fashion these days) and about
love and the land, but there’s a freshness about her work that brought tears to
my eyes. Real tears, like a child’s.”
- Anne Stevenson, Mslexia OctNovDec
2003
“THE SKIN is the volume for me. The Keswick poet
approaches the same territory as is entered by mystics Rumi the Sufi and St
John of the Cross - where the everyday world remains hard and baffling but
transformed by dazzling darkness. I love its ambitious scope and absence of
literary-ness (you won’t find Testament texts). Geraldine Green has to invent
her own language to express her wonder and pity for the wasted world and its
oiled words. The word, like the person, must die to be reborn. Readers too must
submit but also bring their own courage to share in creation.
The dark-light paradox is not resolved but faith prevails:
‘and I write this down because once we were the stones
and once we can be the cathedral and once we are the
two golden fish rescued in a pelican’s beak we will know
what the shapes mean.’
I would like to hear Geraldine Green read that last line.”
- Giles Darvill SOUTH Poetry
Magazine
"Geraldine Green's poems make
you wonder where's the middle and
where’s
the edge and what it is that matters wherever you are. And with both exuberance
and sadness, on an uncharted adventure and uncertain in a backwater, and with a
language that's new-found, new-made for what is needed. One of the world’s
lovers"
-
David
Hart Freelance Writer/Poet
“Geraldine
Green's poems are vivid improvisations based upon the supple rhythms of poetic
free-form. Rich and sensuous in detail, evocative in expression, they yearn to
unite memory, imagination and an often fragmentary reality. 'Green Lizards' is
a high-wire act where risk, desire and accomplishment create poems of precarious
and touching beauty. There is a mythic quality to much of the work here; each
poem a mantra of what is possible if we're prepared to become - and remain
-astonished by our lives."
- Graham Mort
“Her
writing is earthy and heartfelt. She catches the voices and emotions of the
people who live close to the land because it is her own reality and equally
speaks for grass and wind, rocks and
animals. The quiet voice of this poetry is strong, working round the pleasures
and hardships of the natural world with lyric intensity.”
-
Rose Flint Poet and Art Therapist
“The
spiritual polyglot of human aesthetic existence finds luminous iteration in the
work of Cumbrian poet Geraldine Green. In poem after poem she
rushes us headlong, breathless and with frequently dizzying intensity into a
richly woven tapestry.
Her infectious enthusiasm informs a created world which integrates the
vocabulary of her locality with the universality of transcendent vision. Most of us feel lucky if we catch an
occasional glimpse of this duality and, on rare occasions, synthesize it.
For Green, it is normal fare.
Reading her poetry I am once again reminded of how fortunate it is to have
another day on this earth in which to experience anew the specific and the
universal of that great miraculous thing, poetry, so rare and yet so profuse
across the world map of our human family.”
- George Wallace
Writer-in-Residence Walt Whitman
Birthplace
