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What Love Is
Paperback
Publisher Price: $14.99
ISBN13: 9781916830585
Publisher: Hedgehog Poetry Press
Published: Feb 14 2026
Pages: 48
Weight: 0.15
Height: 0.12 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English
I very much enjoyed reading this pamphlet. What Love Is is a set of poems written with such a lyrical beautiful sense of overwhelming love for people, for nature and for place. The poems keep hold of, and revel in, the lush magic and richness of words: of their harmony - each of the phrases are inbuilt with pleasurable sighs, with heart-full notions of wish and prayer. The poems are abundant with grounding with an affinity for the soil, with a naming which connects us to the poet's landscape -
indeed many of the namings seem fragrant and charms-like to utter. These poems offer us a wonderful sense of belonging to both place and memory - have an air of renewal and restoration, of a spiritual relationship with like and land. Darbishire has offered us a skilled sensoryscape of gently uttered power. It has been a pleasure to immerse myself in the poet's calm, evocative, aching and dreamlike imagery.
Jane BurnIt's the question that poets have been trying to answer for centuries, the nature of that all-consuming emotion that renders 'I love you' inadequate. Putting it into words can be hard My mouth, writes Kerry, refused to find the right shape. These are poems reflecting on the nature of love - its passion and its cruelty, how it shapes our lives and our relationships with friends, parents, siblings, children and partners. The poems show, in vivid images, the deep connections we make, demonstrating our feelings in the everyday, ordinary things we do together. The natural world becomes the landscape of a relationship; the paths we walk with those we love, the rooms we inhabit, the objects we own, invested with the lustre of memory - images more powerful than words. A lifetime of caring for each other make 'I love you' somehow inadequate. Kerry has written lines you'll remember long after you've read the poems.
Kathleen JonesKerry Darbishire's new pamphlet What Love Is contains a collection of poems of exquisite depth and beauty that explore love in all its forms. Born and raised in Cumbria, the deep connection with landscape and its people spills out from every page and pours itself down the fell like honey on bread. The deliciousness of language and the mastery of phrasing and pace in the poems show a poet at the height of their ability. The poems reach to the depths of what it is to love and be loved and really are like a gift of bluebells spread like a wide fallen sky.
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