Joy Change by Judy Kendall

Second collection from widely acclaimed poet. Judy Kendall.

‘Wa.Harmony’ from Joy Change was selected for the Forward anthology of best poems 2010.

Praise for Joy Change

This is not a book of poems ‘about’ Japan. It is rather a book of poems of, inside, from Japan by an author deeply embedded in and engaged with its cultural complexities. Although Kendall registers her position as gaijin – ‘outside person’ – she does so with a subtle critique that never overstates difference. This allows the book, in its impressive formal variety, to become a dialogue between its Japanese side and its English side. The poems here explore the gamut of quotidian life – ‘perhaps I’ll make a curry today’ – and the networks of relational otherness – ‘my not-yet-friend’ – to reach a distilled spirituality which seems the very essence of Japan, embodied in the haiku sequence that elegantly threads its way through the book: ‘drifting / mountains shoulder the sky / blotches of pine.’ As another haiku points to the ‘many different roads’ of the Japanese character, the same can be said of Kendall’s rich account of a residence filled with both joy and change.

Scott Thurston

Joy Change is a fascinating study in how to be outside — in this case, outside the dauntingly ‘complete’ society of Japanese manners and language. Part of the collection’s poignancy stems from its realisation that, in a more fundamental sense, this is how we are all placed in relation to the social and perceptual strictures that govern us.

As the book deepens its engagement with Japan we begin to catch glimpses of and insights into that constrained, compressed, astonishingly beautiful world. Judy Kendall is attempting to assay, as one poem has it, nothing less than ‘the weight of things,’ and the result is vivid, intense work, tightly sounded, with a musical precision to its naming and a painterly grasp of concise description.’

W.N. Herbert

An acute observer of nuance and detail, Judy Kendall draws the reader into her own encounter with—her imaginative immersion in—Japan. Never a tourist, she uses her outsider status to heighten our awareness of delicious difference, an experience so rich you might almost not notice the range of poetic skills involved, from historical sweep to the precise haiku moment, from experimental language play to humour and the tactfully-notated ‘tremor in the heart’.

Philip Gross

Judy Kendall spent many years living and working in southern Africa and Japan. Her research interests are in poetic composition and the poetry of Edward Thomas, and she also works as a collaborative translator. In addition to her debut poetry collection with Cinnamon Press (The Drier The Brighter) Judy edited an anthology of Edward Thomas’s poems and related letters to contemporary poets( Carcanet) and is working on a book on Edward Thomas’s composing processes for University of Wales Press. Her second collection, Joy Change, focuses on poems about Japan. Judy lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Salford.