yellow noon-day — Kay Syrad
ISBN: 9781788641753
£9.99
The poems in yellow noon-day are tentative, suggestive, full of colour, risk, danger, anxiety. With full emotional range, they oscillate between the devastating and the comforting, asking existential questions, bringing us words for grief at the destruction of our world, of the eternal cycle of growth and rest itself. Syrad meets this reality, and our amnesia and denial about it, by inventing a fresh and incisive language. The result is a collection that is magnificently focussed, formally varied and inviting, moving delicately between distance and intimacy.
The yellow noon-day sequence takes us gently and yet authoritatively through a portal, so that we can never come back to a place of not having read these poems.
Clare Best
This poetry is demanding in its deceptive simplicity; mysterious in its visible and audible attempt to observe with minimum human intrusion; arresting in its chronicling of striving to be truly connected with the natural world in a way which eschews names, projections and human baggage.
Steve Holland
Kay Syrad’s poems in yellow noon-day are exquisite notations on ‘finding out’ – beautiful, intense experiments, careful and concentrated immersions which push at language and meditation, asking such challenging questions as ‘what is the path when the pure / thing the essential thing is taken and returned / broken’. These are intelligent and tender poems by a poet whose work is always exceptional.
Janet Sutherland
Author biography
Kay Syrad is a poet, novelist and editor based in East Sussex. She has two poetry collections with Cinnamon Press: What is near (2021) and Inland (2018), and another with Pighog, Double Edge (2012). Kay also has two novels with Cinnamon: The Milliner and the Phrenologist (2009/2012) and Send (2015). She was Poetry Editor of Envoi 2014-2020 and writes articles and reviews for a range of journals. Kay often collaborates with artists: she was the commissioned writer on ‘Last Station’, a multi-media art project exploring the history of British lightships, writing a libretto for a choral piece with composer Trevor Watts, and creating a limited edition book, work of the lightship men: 1000 tasks (2014), which was purchased by the National Maritime Museum. Her art-text work, Exchange, with environmental artist, Chris Drury, is published by Little Toller (2015), and as one half of the composite eco-poet kin’d & kind (with Clare Whistler) she has published a chapbook, h/edge (Elephant Press, 2021) and edited several eco-poetry anthologies, including Wild Correspondings: a source book (also Elephant Press, 2021).
Visit Kay’s site to discover more.