Love Haunts in Shades of Blue – Yvonne Baker
ISBN: 9781788641531
£9.99
Winner of the Poetry category, 2025, Rubery Book Award
In this prize-winning, lyrical debut full collection, we encounter poetry that is both delicate and powerful. Yvonne Baker writes in the liminal space between the interior and exterior world, illuminating both with grace and precision.
What it means to belong, how memory constitutes us, how identity shifts and weaves, how we live in an uncertain world with authenticity and without giving up hope—these themes thread together lucid moments and small but vital epiphanies. And even at their most interior, these moments are embodied, we sense the person of another creature, we feel the weight of ‘plastic babies’, cup in our hands the porcelain of a pot that holds more than air, hear ‘the clink of stone and shell’ on a shingle beach, sit by a washing machine and weep and feel the ‘roots/ yellow as old bones, / shift in darkness, undeterred.’
Haunted and haunting, Love Haunts in Shades of Blue, conjures the fragility of past and future, but like the ‘Bristlecone Pine’ offers the faith that ‘… the heartwood, linking root to trunk, / will be enough to sustain you.’
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.