Garry Ely: Featured Poet

.

You’ve been reprieved,
or so I believe.

It is possible for you to walk today from Tintagel
to Boscastle.
This abrupt descent
takes you down to the bay. Your footfalls cease.
You are recuperating
in the whitened air: fatigued,
unafraid;
and silently waiting for me
to catch you up.

.

.

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Garry Ely was born in Tunbridge Wells in 1953 and studied at Newcastle University. He was head of buying for an organic food company for many years and is now a support worker in a community mental health team for older people in Oxford. Angel Visits brings together poems written over a lifetime.

‘Angel Visits is a delicate and moving sequence which manages, through its clarity of expression and control of language, to deal with intensely personal and painful material while never excluding the reader. Each short poem is complete in itself, emotionally rich and full of allusion and yet with never a word too many: in each, the language is pared back to the minimum to leave the central image pulsing like an exposed nerve. The cumulative result is a powerful and finely-judged insight into and evocation of love, loss and grief.’ Caroline Price

‘I encountered the unmistakeable bullseye, the authentic maximum…when you know, by whatever means, that this is the real thing.

“Incurious,
condemned, you go on staring at the broken shapes
your clothes make in the shadows,
preparing to give themselves away.”

Very sad; very good poetry.’ Kit Wright