Backwards, forwards across the sea – Yvonne Baker
ISBN: 9781788648929
£9.99
Yvonne Baker has the ability to conjure a world that is at once recognisable and fresh. In this two-part collection we travel with those whose migration brings new worlds and loss in equal amounts. Who do we become in a different place separated from a land that still calls us? Who do we become if we remain behind? Baker interrogates these questions in sequences alive with vivid details, illuminated with affection and empathy. Here lives flutter down in fragments, a shelter is built of story, and unwritten rules for the poor are exposed. Here Irish aunts and other saints leap from the page, ready with an umbrella, making a holy show of themselves, or finding peace in the deep waters of the heart.
Themes of belonging, memory and what haunts us run through all of Yvonne Baker’s work, and her gift is to bring new perspectives to the questions we ask about what forms us, how we navigate a shifting world and how we remember those we love yet never fully know. At there heart of this collection that tends a sacred fire, ‘Time judders slowly slides forward accelerates’.
Author biography
Yvonne Baker is married with three sons and five grandchildren. She worked for many years as a teacher in primary education, and later as a headteacher and religious education adviser. She has been published in print and on-line magazines and placed in competitions. Her poems have been included in Second Light, Paper Swans, Emma Press and Poetry Space anthologies. She belongs to several poetry groups: Chichester Stanza, Taking Your Work Further, Kith Poets and Second Light Network, all of which offer support and friendship.Her poetry explores the relationship between the outer and inner experience and how this can reveal hidden emotions and feelings. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Tree Light, was a winner in the Cinnamon Pamphlet Prize 2022 and her debut collection, Love Haunts in Shades of Blue, won the Cinnamon Literature Prize.