Penny Sharman
This is very much a collection about growing up in the 50’s and 60’s and how becoming pregnant as a teenager and being sent away from home to an unmarried mother and baby home has affected my whole life. The collection includes poems from the Cotswolds, Oxford, Manchester and the Pennines. It includes themes such as love and loss of family, lovers and friends. As I have just turned seventy-five, I very much consider this collection a reverie, looking back and taking stock, going forward to my crone stage as a woman. Of course, there are poems about the pandemic and coming to terms with grief. I am always inspired to write by the natural landscape and many of these poems will reflect this in the imagery and metaphors.'’I’ve been trying to tell you for years about my mother’s suitcase’. In Penny Sharman’s Sunbathing with Fishermen there’s a whole life in these pages, at its heart a mother packing a suitcase to send her daughter away. There are poems about childhood and coming of age, about lockdown and love and loss, from a girl on Magdalen Bridge ’ready to jump into dirty water’ to a woman ’trolling the face mask section wondering which one might save her life’. An enviable turn of phrase, images to die for. I loved it.'Carole Bromley, Poet.'Penny Sharman’s Sunbathing with Fishermen begins with a litany of forgetting and ends with a secret supplication which can’t be spoken aloud. In between are poems that tug at the spaces between plain language and the moments that make all our lives too big for the telling. Deeply personal, but observed from precisely the right distance, the poems here surge like the water that’s never far from their surface, swirling everything that’s held onto or lost into seemingly chance patterns which only reveal their significance when you get to know their tides. Strong and deeply affecting, this resonant collection offers a litany of sharp recollections, and is raw with the need to speak them aloud.'Oz Hardwick, Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity.
