Published by Poetry Space, 2024
ISBN 978-1-909404-55-7

Description

Poetry Space is delighted to be publishing Myra Schneider’s 16th poetry collection this year.

Myra had her first collection published in 1985, by John Killick. She has read widely at poetry festivals and many other venues, been published in well-known newspapers and journals shortlisted for a Forward prize in 2007. Her work has appeared in a large number of anthologies and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in Poetry Please. She is a consultant to the Second Light Network of women poets founded by Dilys Wood in the late 1990s. and she writes reviews and articles for their twice-yearly magazine for women poets, ARTEMIS poetry and occasionally for other magazines.

Myra Schneider’s compassion for the natural world and the thrill she gets from immersing herself in nature shine through in this collection. Schneider recognises the earth as a life giving force that drives her creativity, and she honours its resilience.

Excerpt

We weep to see buildings crumble, telegraph poles

topple and cars drown but still fail to appease the world’s seas.

                                                            From Poseidon

Reviews

Centred in a homely urban environment, the poet explores the green world with all means available to her: she goes into gardens and parks and makes creative use of memory, imagination, and research. Painting and music, evoked and transposed in these poems, add different kinds of vividness. Individual lyrics give way to sustained sequences. The mysticism and practical tenacity of Hildegard of Bingen are enthrallingly recreated, the controlled fury of Artemesia Gentileschi is channelled so forcefully it scorches the pages, and the sublimity of Hokusai’s Mount Fuji leaves us on a higher plane. ~ John Freeman

A timely collection from one of our most creatively energetic and generous-spirited poets. In Believing in the Planet, Myra Schneider engages unflinchingly with the most urgent crisis of our age while attending, with unashamed passion, to all the wonders “we’re on the brink of losing”, from humble dandelions and woolly bats to the coral reef and the rainforest. She puts our planet-wounding species firmly in its place but knows that celebration is the best medium for militancy, and these exuberant poems are a testament to nature’s “determination to survive” and to the transformative powers of the poet’s imagination, where a hare is followed effortlessly on its journey to the hills, the wildlife of Ghana wreaks glorious havoc in the heart of the city and the primeval past can be summoned in a heartbeat… ~ Ruth Sharman