Flashes and Specks by Elizabeth Ashworth
Extract (Download)
In her second full length collection Elizabeth Ashworth displays a carefully honed skill, acute powers of observation and an enviable range.
Birds and light, shadow and dark, the questing spirit of Walt Whitman, impermanence and a refusal to take anything for granted coalesce in mature language that is threaded with humour and made precise by the artist’s eye at work.
Praise for Flashes and Specks
These longer poems are juxtaposed with others of a much shorter, sharper form so that the collection as a whole offers a dynamic range of work. Though this poet draws powerfully on the lexicon of nature, the book is equally peopled, with relationships explored for their potential and their failure. Chiarascuro works as a thematic symbol for this collection, the myriad forms of transient life standing in relief against the dark background of non-being and death; for each moment trembles on the brink of going over, and mystery lies at the heart of the everyday.
Fiona Owen
Elizabeth Ashworth is a short story writer, poet, journalist and now working on a novel about John Constable, Constable’s Clouds. Liz was born in Buxton and has lived in north Wales for most of her. She has taught creative writing for fifteen years to children and adults. She is English Leader of Conwy’s Writing Squad and has taught creative writing on the BA and PGCE programmes at Bangor University’s Department of Lifelong Learning. Her Outposts poetry collection A New Confusion won the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and she was second prizewinner in the HE Bates Short Story Competition. At the moment she is creative writing tutor on ’Stori Pen’ an oral history of Penmaenmawr.