Poetry Pamphlets, Poetry Collections...

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