About a year ago, I decided that I was ready to have a book published. Dear reader, I was not. I cobbled together a bunch of loosely-linked poems and called it a manuscript. It got rejected, twice, and I promptly gave up on that particular project.
A while ago now I had the pleasure of being published in a charming print journal called Nightingale & Sparrow – you can read that piece, ‘Shakespeare in Camden, 2019’, here. Working with them was such a lovely experience – the quality of the product they created, the care they took, their kindness – so when they launched a search for manuscripts I instantly knew that I had to throw my pen into the ring. So I dusted off that old draft, read it, and realised that it was start-to-finish awful. The initial thread, though, of poems linked together by a loosely-interpreted theme of grief, was good. It was one that I had naturally accumulated a wealth of work on over the past year, as though this book had been silently germinating in my gut. After much hacking and sawing and plucking and soul-searching – only one or two of the original poems remain – I sent it off, my reanimated corpse of a manuscript.
It is my absolute delight to be able to announce that Nightingale and Sparrow accepted, and will publish my first book next September! All the Shades of Grief, a chapbook of 22 poems, is (in the words of my publisher!) “a beautifully haunting look at grieving as both personal and universal.” And, I promise, it is not quite as depressing as it might sound!
Previously published poems featured in the collection include ‘Daphne’ and ‘Orbuculum’.
You can find out more about All the Shades of Grief on the Nightingale & Sparrow website.
Ellora Sutton 