Bøker av Kathryn Simmonds

A warm and reassuring picture book about finding your courage even when you'd rather play it safe.The children are planting sunflowers at school and Carla gets given a seed called Vernon. All the other children's seeds are excited to get out of the packet and start growing. Not Vernon. He knows about slugs, and birds, and thunderstorms. The world is scary.Carla waters him lovingly, but Vernon is the only seed that doesn't grow into a seedling. "Safe and snug, snug and safe," mutters Vernon, until he realizes how upset Carla is. Vernon understands that he needs to pluck up his courage, push himself out of the ground, and face the world. He needs to do it for Carla. And as Vernon blossoms into a sunflower, he discovers that although the world is not perfect, it can be ... wonderful.

Tackling the loss of the poet's mother - as well as themes of motherhood, birth, death and marriage - this poignant collection explores how we grieve and remember those we love.

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn Simmonds' Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. The poems are entertaining, amusing and accessible, but unafraid to bring in darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone shifts throughout between the elegiac and the sharply satirical, lit up with life's moments of sudden illumination: a life coach finds an old passport, an infant teeters on the brink of speech."This playful and knowing first collection is fuelled throughout by a strong sense of lyricism." - The Guardian on Sunday at the Skin LaunderetteKathryn Simmonds' first book of poems, Sunday at the Skin Launderette (Seren, 2008; ISBN 9781854114617), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Felix Dennis Prize, and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her pamphlet of poems Snug was a winner in the Poetry Business competition in 2004 and subsequently published by Smith/Doorstop (ISBN 9781902382678). She lives in London and works as a freelance writer, editor and teacher.

Infused with a fresh, lively voice, these poems address the dilemmas of a young woman living in the city. Humor and a poignant grace link the pieces, which are remarkable for the way they transform the mundane, so that days spent in dull jobs, on the bus, and at the photocopier suddenly fill with expectation and beauty. Flashes of surrealism invade the poems and transform quotidian scenes into something nightmarish, as when a secretary flies straight up into space, or the neighborhood laundry is revealed as a house of horrors.