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Black Eyes would like to invite you to the launch of Josephine Lay’s new poetry collection, ‘A kind of alchemy’ at the Friends Meeting House, Cheltenham, on Friday 12th June, doors open 6.45pm for a prompt start at 7.00pm..
As well as Josephine, there will be readings from Anna Saunders, Zoe Brooks, Belinda Rimmer & Carol Sheppard.
Signed copies of ‘A kind of alchemy’ available to purchase at a special launch price, on the night.
There will also be a limited ‘open-mic’ (sign up on the night).
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Josephine Lay’s poems speak of the darkness in the world today, of personal loss and the ghosts within abandoned homes. She has moved many times in her life and constant upheaval has led to an altered perception of place, of what it means to belong. She finds a cure through her lifelong love of trees. She seeks out the glints of gold in the fabric of life. Her poems are a balm for the tired mind, an antidote to despair.
For Lay, nature is the alchemist.
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Josephine Lay’s latest collection speaks of loss: loss of loved ones who have gone before us and loss of nature at the destructive hands of humanity. But there is also love in these poems… Josephine Lay’s fine poems are written from a mature standpoint; they are at times very personal and yet they speak for all of us.
Zoe Brookes
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Vulnerable, celebratory, mournful, full of ghosts, these are poems of loss, of a love affair with nature, of desire. Josephine Lay explores what it means to age… to be in transit, where even her beloved trees…must be forsaken.
A kind of alchemy succeeds in seizing this rupture…with a sense of hope and wonder – ‘we change, we change, and there lies / the curse and the cure.’ This book feels like a capturing of a life lived and Lay’s desire to leave, like the deer in her poem, a print in the soil.
Belinda Rimmer
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A kind of alchemy is Josephine Lay’s fourth poetry collection after Inside Reality (2018) Unravelling (2019) and A Quietus (2021).
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Event Venue
Friends Meeting House, Warwick Place, Cheltenham GL52 2NP, 6 Gloucester Place, Cheltenham, GL52 2RJ, United Kingdom
Tickets
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