Lightship – Bruce Ackerley
ISBN: 9781788648592
£13.99
Twenty years ago, Bruce Ackerley won Cinnamon Press’s inaugural poetry collection prize with his debut, Sound of Mountain, of which RV Bailey wrote: “finely crafted, lyrical and spare…. with a musical ear for landscape and relationships. An interesting, individual voice, he writes with power and sensitivity.”
In Lightship, Ackerley now brings together his finest writing from two decades, the voice confident and supple with a deepened lyricism and an acute sense of what to say, and what not to say, each poem is honed gem—poised and resonant. Ranging across the natural and supernatural, the solace and joys of art, film and music, love, grief and sexuality, and the vicissitudes of mental health, Lightship is both an internal record and a reaching out. A moving, distinctive pièce de résistance.
Author Biography
Bruce Ackerley spent his childhood on a dairy farm on the Cheshire Plain. After graduating, he worked for some years in the Civil Service but spent the lion’s share of his career employed as a social housing officer in Nottingham until recently retiring with his husband, Alan, to a small market town in East Shropshire. He has previously published two collections of poetry: Sound of Mountain (2006) with Cinnamon Press and Nantyr Sequence (2009) with Triskelewrites. He is currently working on his debut novel, which he hopes to publish during 2026.