Sally Richards

"This collection never fails to move one on a profound emotional level..."

Alan Morrison

"Richards' poetry actually says something which is quite rare in modern poetry... She creates very successfully a doubt in the mind of the reader..."

Nigel Humphreys

"Sally Richards collection 'Emperor Dragonfly', issued in E-book format by Caparison Books, 2011, is a fusion of definition and sensibility, a solidity lodging the ephemeral, as inferred in the collection's title, leading through the opening scene-setting poem 'Tree Speak': the sometimes gentle, musical, at times stormy, forceful/'… 'they have finally met/and now negotiate/their new found connection//' – yes, communication is intimate, but battling openly.
Fragile spring growth contests with the 'pirates' of near-human form, the inferences of battling, an unnatural settlement of earth in how human pleasure overtakes necessity and rhythm –'blue-sky-days pass/all too soon//' and the remembrance, homage even of something we have and forget, almost, is where Richards brings us alive again – she has not forgotten on our behalf.
'Four Journeying – Past Caradoc to Llanrindod: The Heart-of-Wales Line' p12-13 captures the journeyman relationships, dips down to lift up, whether it be 'eight months of their growing/missed…' for the lone grandmother, who 'closes her violet blues', or, the young freed, there's generosity in fear through Richards' recognisable, jolting story. Though the shock as the reader is made aware they have similar background is not a cruel dig, but an affirmation that it will be and is alright to let go into a 'warming future story' in the poem of 'A view to the future' p14.
The fixing of time is recognised as a task not meant even for the poet, although Richards does this better than most philosopher-poets through the ages, giving a glimpse in 'Stationary' p22, catching the impossibility of scent and thought, her 'grain of sand' doesn't slip, it's recorded to again prompt the past, present, future to be considered in a current universe before the choice – destruction or a certain harmony, that may be 'tea-stained, crumpled', but that would be in a 'then', not now. The poems bleaken at this point, sensory rooms are never used, gardens untended, occasional nature is 'indescribable stodge', the nourishment plays against the nourishment in the earlier poems. In 'Abandoned: Mogolinio Children's Institute, Bulgaria' p25-28 Richards sets the other side of utopia with that of true remembrance; as also in the present, in our own places, 'How Can You' p30 - 'these streets, these streets' are not elsewhere, they are here, 'The Bigger Issue' p31-32
Richards brings us back – in the poem 'There is light…where is the tunnel?' 'life can only travel forwards/so that must be the way//' p43-44, and does so with poetic vision: 'doing time/writing rhyme' - and the conclusion: '…till/pumped-up/you emerge/magnificent/' p3 Emperor Dragonfly.
An abundant and assertive collection, a print run would be desirable also, I think, for Richards to reach the untold memories waiting to find peace in a growing and avidly appreciative readership. 'Emperor Dragonfly' is a collection that affirms the poet's place in the world and equally affirms poetry's place in the world as we know it, and could know it.

Philip Ruthen. April 2012

“In this New Age collection, Sally Richards casts off the trappings of an artificial age and unabashedly addresses the timeless complaints of an abused Mother Earth, groaning beneath Man’s ruinous girding. Richards’ pantheistic eye compellingly confronts the perennial ontological angst of our species – whose ‘business is in wakefulness’ (Nietzsche); and, shunting an undercurrent of thanatophobia, extends the metaphor to a chilling ‘what if i’m somebody’s dream/ and they simply decide/ to wake/ up’ (‘and so to bed…’). Suddenly Douglas Adams’ solipsistic God, oblivious to his Creation, absent-mindedly watering pot plants in a suburban void, springs to mind. But Richards’ is a darker take: humanity as a spoor of seedlings propagated from the same parent organism; or, darker still, blight on a plant; a rash on a body; a phantasmagoria of thought-forms on a brain – indeed, dreams threatened by wakefulness. But such bottomless questions are softened in their ‘depth-charged reverberation’ by the lift and flight of Richards’ pastoral lyricism, balancing ‘each crack of the ice’ (‘Mount wood pond’) of abstract with ‘voile-draped’ (‘The Cottage’) tangible, as only true poetry can. With Plathian parabulia and a talent – akin to the early lyrics of Kate Bush – at poeticising the saturnine, Richards’ sepia-like poems paint brightly on dark canvases, while never shying from sharpening up so the ‘Broad textured trunks/ loom/ out of soft-focus’ (‘The Cottage’). This is another sublime, phantasmal collection from the author of the equally beguiling Stained Glass.”

Alan Morrison, author of The Mansion Gardens

“It opens very strongly with The Silent Grove and Until and then you seem to have a most searching middle section of 7 or 8 poems from Aeon (which I know well) to Earth … I think these central explorative poems are where your strength lies as a poet. You manage to create very successfully, I think, a doubt in the mind of the reader concerning the insignificance of man within the cosmos by way of your own experience. You achieve this by making it all too apparent. Some of the questing poems are quite uplifting despite their potential broad canvas for gloom so that one comes away from the Collection nourished. Human life is served well. I feel you are at your most penetrative when you deal with the spirit - which you don't shy away from as I might. Your poetry actually says something which is quite rare in modern poetry I think.”

Nigel Humphreys, Poet & Author

With the ability to weave works with an intimacy and grace that helps them flow past the eye seamlessly, Sally Richards has presented astute, observational messages with great sophistication here in Through the Silent Grove. Her passionate and often compelling descriptions make for a puissantly emotive compilation – one that confirms her status as a true Border town talent.

Mat Woods, Deputy Editor Country & Border Life

Sally's book is delightful and small enough to fit into my pocket, which is why I carry it about with me so that I can then read them when I get a few minutes. They can take me away from the mundane and stressful to the sublime in a few words which can calm and soothe me as well as make me smile. A perfect gift for the self and for friends and family - if you want to part with it!

June Meagher - Marketing Manager for a global news service and member of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers.

“Sally Richards' poetry is a true emotional shot for any reader, rinsed from the murkier of human preoccupations: death, life, love - and the fear and rapture of all three. Perennial themes yes, but expressed by Richards in a surprising and refreshing way. Her poetry is scored with subtle musicality, a popular lyric sensibility, most typified by her haunting refrains. Above all, Richards' poetry shares itself with us, as true poetry should. Stained Glass is a deeply rewarding debut from an unassuming but talented new voice.”

Alan Morrison, mentor

"Thank you Sally Richards for such an excellent and deeply thought provoking solo collection…So many of the poems are outstanding and have already become favorites of mine but in particular I'm especially drawn into the power of the cosmic hopefulness of Aeon (page 38)

I blinked
the sky turned over
a wave of starlight
rolled
through my hair

and gripped by the almost overwhelmingly intensity of Love (page 27) where the third (the middle) stanza out cries:

He's lost to it; the mire;
eyes now wild, empty;
vision displaced -
cold windows
to an even colder psyche
in tatters.

i very highly recommend it to all readers of poetry - to all thinkers of and about poetry - as well as to all writers. Buy it, read it, give it as a present for others to enjoy!"

Steve Mann, poet, author cui bono?

“A brilliant poet”

David Kessel, Survivors’ Poetry author

"...darkly enchanting lyricism…nakedness of spirit...her own distinctive means of expression...often refreshingly confessional...explorative of her own obsessions..."

Alan Morrison – poet & playwright www.therecusant.org.uk

Stained Glass, a powerful new collection of poetry from Shrewsbury poet Sally Richards, has just been launched at Shrewsbury Market Hall and The Poetry Café in London, as one of a series of pamphlets from the Survivors’ Poetry National Mentoring Scheme. The collection has already garnered critical notice from the Shropshire Star, the Shropshire Chronicle and Country and Border Life Magazine, for which Richards’ is Poet in Residence.

Press release reviews

At a packed Poetry Café in London’s Covent Garden, Richards read a selection from Stained Glass to an engrossed audience of poets and poetry lovers, all immediately drawn to her lyrical, emotionally compelling work, which beguiles with its nakedness of spirit. The audience’s appreciation was evident in the quantity of Stained Glass bought that night by Richards’ admirers.

Press release reviews

‘Stained ‘Glass’ is a great title for this collection by a bruised ex-convent girl, now a graceful Shropshire poet whose voice has been silenced more than once by the emotional trammels of life along the way. To borrow a stanza from the book…

She’s been through a lot
been shut down,
lost the plot
lost some of her hair
down the plug.

But these days, the introduction to this book tells us, ‘the fragments are coming back together’. Sally Richards is very much a product of the rich and beautiful landscape she grew up in and is known in Shropshire for her poetic treatments of favourite natural landmarks….I think of her work as ‘delicate’ and ‘light’ but there is nothing frivolous or superficial about it. She has the ability to weave words, with minimal punctuation, in a way that seems weightless on the eye, on the page – but the message they carry is as clear as cold steel. In this collection a narrator tells us that…

Just as the softness of reflected trees
begins to lull her into a painless place
dark descends, a different light calls

Kay Green –author, editor Circaidy Gregory Press

"This extremely handsome and well-produced book (Waiting for Gulliver) announces itself as ‘original poems by Sally Richards and Steve Mann, Shropshire Poets’ – but this is more than just a collection of poems. The paradoxical title ‘Colourful and Dark’ is the first indicator of the kaleidoscopic world you are about to enter when you open the book. It is divided into five sections, Life and Introspection, Fantasy and Spirit, Nature and the Universe, On the Lighter Side, and Dark Experience and Emotion. One sees at once that all of human life is here, and indeed the scope of the book takes in everything from fatalistic depression to Gothic tales that revel in darkness, and from light-hearted rhymes and drawings of family pets to an existential denial of the value of thought. A human life isn’t neatly divided into good days and bad days, few experiences act only on one area of our lives, and far too many books seek to impose an order that does not, in fact, exist. When I first dipped into this book, I called it a chaotic, kitchen-table world. The common thread that runs through it is Richards’ and Mann’s tender enjoyment of the Shropshire landscape and rural life which is the setting of their own lives. Having gone deeper into the book, I stand by my first impression. ‘Waiting for Gulliver’ is a warm, inclusive, disarmingly frank human picture of rural England and all who sail (and sometimes sink) in her: domestic and familiar one minute, startling and vernacular the next. If you want a pretty and comforting book about the countryside, give it a miss. If you want a real and wonderful world with your actual human beings thrashing around in it, you will enjoy this book."

Kay Green, Earlyworks Press & Circaidy Gregory

With the ability to weave works with an intimacy and grace that helps them flow past the eye seamlessly, Sally Richards has presented astute, observational messages with great sophistication here in Through the Silent Grove. Her passionate and often compelling descriptions make for a puissantly emotive compilation – one that confirms her status as a true Border town talent.

Mat Woods, Deputy Editor Country & Border Life

“Meeting Sally Richards has changed my perception of poetry and poets… Sally’s story is inspirational and after our meeting I made myself a promise to read her new book ”

Liz Gray, news editor, The Shropshire Star

Your poetry paints pictures with words"

audience member at library event 2008.