The Same Country brings together many of Liz Cashdan's poems on paintings and sculptures together with two sequences representing her interest in archaeology, landscape and history.Of these poems, Barbara Trapido wrote in Mslexia “I adored Liz Cashdan’s ‘Elgar's Dog’ because I’m so turned on by patterned cleverness” while Selima Hill, in the same journal, said the author has “a cool alluring sureness of touch with a sense of the scary vulnerability of being flawed, passionate and human”. Describing ‘Red’ in Scintilla, Anne Cluysenaar said “This is wonderful poetry, combining sensuality with vision.”Ambit said of her previous Five Leaves collection, Laughing All the Way “This is a fascinating book, with a great deal to say and an effective way of saying it. I thought virtually every poem at least good, and a few are first-rate.”Liz Cashdan lives in Sheffield and teaches creative writing at Sheffield University, for the WEA and in schools. She has been editor for many years of the National Association of Writers in Education Journal and is the poetry editor of Jewish Renaissance. Earlier collections are Troublesome Cattle and Almost Like Talking, both from Smith/Doorstop; and Laughing All the Way from Five Leaves.Cover design: Pat Hodson (www.pathodson.co.uk) from her digital sequence, Flotsam, for which Liz Cashdan wrote the sequence One Way or Another.
These two collections taken together (Same Country, Liz Cashdan & Still Breathing, Cathy Grindrod) make plain that Five Leaves know what they are about. Though a small concern they are clearly providing poetry pamphlets that contain well edited quality poetry. If one believes there is a pecking order between the pamphlet and the full collection then this is a small press that proves without doubt that there shouldn't be.
She constructs poems like a painter, laying down colour and line, combining social history, archaeology and landscape. This is social history at its best
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