Judy Kendall's launch of Joy Change

Contact: jan@cinnamonpress.com

Join Judy Kendall for the launch of Joy Change at Chorlton Arts Festival Lloyds Upstairs, Thursday 27 May, 6.30 p.m.

Lloyds Hotel, 617 Wilbraham Road, Chorlton, Manchester, M21 9AN

An acute observer of nuance and detail, Judy Kendall draws the reader into her own encounter with—her imaginative immersion in—Japan. Never a tourist, she uses her outsider status to heighten our awareness of delicious difference, an experience so rich you might almost not notice the range of poetic skills involved, from historical sweep to the precise haiku moment, from experimental language play to humour and the tactfully-notated ‘tremor in the heart’.
Philip Gross

Judy Kendall spent many years living and working in southern African and Japan. Her research interests are in poetic composition and the poetry of Edward Thomas, and she also works as a collaborative translator. In addition to her debut poetry collection with Cinnamon Press (The Drier The Brighter) Judy edited an anthology of Edward Thomas’s poems and related letters to contemporary poets( Carcanet) and is working on a book on Edward Thomas's composing processes for University of Wales Press. Her second collection, Joy Change, focuses on poems about Japan. Judy lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Salford

An Extract from Joy Change

The Most Beautiful

for Yukari

coming weary from the goldstream

dead ends every where

to the west capital

maple temples burning
red in the mixing bowl

eight thousand four hundred
taxi drivers hunt the kerb

and you pick out the local guy

the one that doesn’t make up stories
the one that knows where to find
the most beautiful tree

over at the palace
down by the gate
he says

you can’t miss it

Time: 6:30pm