The Shadow House by Kathy Miles

Praise for Miles’ poetry

Kathy Miles is a poet with a unique voice. Her poems are dense and subtle but always accessible. Whatever the subject of the poem you can be sure that Kathy Miles will come at it from a totally original angle. There is almost always an intake of surprise. Many of her poems reveal something dark and elusive at their heart: She is particularly good at hinting at an unsettling undercurrent in relationships,

The list of her successes is impressive. As well as her two books The Rocking Stone and The Third Day: Landscape and the Word she has been published in the most prestigious literary magazines and anthologies, most notably The Forward Book of Poetry 2008, as well as winning prizes in many competitions.

Anne Grimes

These poems tug at the heart and reverberate as they soar and dive into our psyche. And, as Miles rightly proclaims, ‘sometimes we get what we wish for’ — poems sharply-observed which makes us linger long at her poetic table.

Menna Elfyn

These rich, imaginative new poems from Kathy Miles are well worth the wait since her last collection. Many were written at that time in a poet’s life when parents age and die, and recalled and present things are caught the more sweetly and intensely because of it. Her poems are layered with myth, history, personal experience. They are full of fine observation, whether of love and loss, weather, a walk in low sunlight, a boy fetching the mares home, or Anthony Gormley’s iron men striding the sea edge near Liverpool. It is a lovely collection, human, humorous, sensuous, the real enriched by myth, and myth deepened by the essential realism of the poet’s vision.

Gillian Clarke

Kathy Miles is a poet, playwright and short-story writer, Kathy also writes children’s stories and monologues. She was born in Liverpool and moved to Wales in 1972. Educated at University of Wales, Lampeter, Kathy now works in the College library. She has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and successful in several major competitions including winning the One Voice Monologue Competition twice. She is a founder-member of the Lampeter Writers’ Workshop.