Splintering the Dark

BUT So we may see(Sappho Fragment 6) it's the silence in the walls; the language of the bricks the chimney flue and the muffled cry with only the odd sigh escaping into night beyond The Plough over oceans to your early evening snows ... Moniza Alvi has said of Wendy French's first full collection that it is "packed with risk-taking poems, cut close to the bone." Wendy is the former headteacher of a hospital school for disturbed pupils and there are poems about them, about children in Africa and about the death of a dearly-loved niece. There is also a wonderful sequence of poems introduced by fragments of the poems of Sappho. Wendy French is the author of two pamphlets: Sky Over Bedlam and We Have A Little Sister And She Hath No Breasts (from tall-lighthouse). She has also edited two Rockingham anthologies of hospital children's poems -- Dog Bark (for the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital School) and What's Your Problem? (for the Guys Hospital Evelina School). Published June 2005