Sunward/Moonwise

Sunward/Moonwise is a weekend at a festival; an evening in a pub beer garden; a journey up and down and across the UK by train; a peek into the afterlife, the otherworld; a walk with flowers and creatures telling us their secrets; conversations with rivers; a melody you remember at the strangest times. These are poems of discovery and connection, looking for a new start in every ending.

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Signed copies of Sunward/Moonwise are £7 + shipping.

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"Conversational and crafted, Kate Garrett builds a subtle sense of self and place in this collection. Sunward/Moonwise is rich with images and lines that stick around, against backdrops made from train window views and mixtape tracklists." - Chris Hemingway

"Kate Garrett deftly imbues the everyday with fairy tale motifs, subtly blending them to dramatise daily challenges. She allows her writing to lead her to discoveries about the nature of human frailty. The range of form in this collection is fresh and inventive. Garrett's language is gorgeous and musical. One can only stand back and admire certain lines, which retain clarity while doing the poet's work of perfectly expressing the unsayable." -- Angela Topping

"Kate is a complex person, but this tells us nothing: Kate is a person; people are complex; therefore Kate is complex. What most people are not, however, is able to express their full complexity. Most settle for some simple summary such as “I’m a Pisces and I like cricket.”
There is no such simplification here, instead there are more than 50 fascinating poems filled with meetings and partings; place and character; tiny events pulled from the stream of memory; and others, recently experienced, noted, annotated and pushed out into the flow on little homemade rafts of their very own...
This is not a miscellany, not a telling of items from the poet’s preoccupations (“witchy ways … history, horror, folklore.”) It is, rather, deeply autobiographical. Not in the sense of a story being told, or not only that, but also a whole self presented: its history, joys, pains, and all the processes by which it became the complex person who then sat down and wrote poems.
Kate is a seeker. She left America, seeking, and found the UK: London, Manchester, Sheffield, the Welsh borders, love, meetings, partings, pets, children, Delia Derbyshire, buddleia bushes, and a girl on the London Underground whom she didn’t go home with. There is, however, no point in me telling you what these poems are about, you must read them yourself. We never stop seeking, because the journey is the destination." - Ian Badcoe

"'I took the book to the pub, began to read / in low light reflected through a half-down / pint of stout' Garrett writes in “When I met the goddess in Covent Garden”. A fine piece of advice, indeed: take these vividly written poems to the pub, to the train, to the library, to the madhouse, to the rehab, to the prison cell, to the mountain top, to the riverbank, to the seaside… And let passion, nostalgia, mystery and love embrace you, as the storyteller takes you by the hand and guides you through an intimate poetic journey." - Dr Raphael d'Abdon