Remembering

ISBN: 9781915434203

Format: Pamphlet, 40 pages,

Available (Published: September 2024)

£7.00

Book details

Remembering includes poems based on the few facts Julie Gardner knows about the early life of her mother, who died suddenly at the age of forty-seven. These poems are fictional yet symphonic in their scope and show how a whole life story can be built up from the simple knowledge of a person’s existence. A second sequence, about Julie’s husband, Arthur, who died in 2008, is very real, raw yet tender and full of blessings.
These poems are written by a grandmother in the hope that her granddaughters will read them and know that she loved and was loved. Read in combination, the stand-alone poems and the two sequences shine with that love.

About the Author

Julie Gardner was born in Coventry. Since then she has lived in Cheshire, Wiltshire, Newark, Bedford, Cambridge, Worcestershire and Leicestershire. She moved to Nottingham in 2016 and loves living in the city. A primary school teacher for over forty years, she retired in 2017 and enrolled on an MA course. She enjoyed it so much she is now working towards a PhD, focussing on the work of Nottingham-born poet, Vicki Feaver.

1 review for Remembering

  1. 5 out of 5

    Memorial poetry has a long tradition and for a good reason. It holds the individual human life in the light of the present – the story, voice, and details of each life in its uniqueness. In two sequences Julie Gardner brings the lives of her mother and her own husband into the shared space between reader and poet, letting her imagination play across nursery rhyme, history, unanswered questions and real lives with poetic assurance. She writes with that intelligent lightness which a poet brings, a concentration on the centrality of emotional truth shaped by an exactness in language and form. These poems give us – and their subjects – an enriched presence.
    DA Prince

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