JUDITH WOZNIAK

MAKING DOLMADES IN ESSEX
by Judith Wozniak
Published on 1st October 2024

Making Dolmades in Essex is Judith Wozniak’s first full poetry collection. Raised in Essex in the second half of the twentieth century, with skilled poetic imagery she recalls her family’s origins in the coal mining valleys of Wales and their resettlement in Essex. She takes the reader back to the days of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood — we share some poignant memories, and others that are irrepressibly optimistic and affectionate, in poems that are by turns intimate, wry, humorous and coolly meditative.

Diana Cant reviews 'Making Dolmades in Essex" in London Grip (Nov. 2024)
Read the full review
"Wozniak has the ability to remember in extraordinary detail, but as a poet, it’s not enough to observe and recall – you have to be able to put it into words, and they have to be the right words.

This is Wozniak’s skill. She conjures up a world that some of, us of a certain age, will remember, and those of us who are younger may begin to glimpse and understand. There is a narrative arc here, from an Essex childhood with visits to family in Wales, school days interspersed by mournful summer seaside holidays all leading towards growing independence, student life in insalubrious London digs, and then marriage, motherhood and adult caring. If that seems like too broad a sweep, it’s not – it’s managed in a skilful and understated way, packed with Wozniak’s trademark details that have you saying to yourself, ‘oh, yes. I remember that’. We follow the trajectory of a mother/daughter relationship that is shot through with sadness and worry, where the fathers’ absence is only explained at the very end.
[...] 
There are a number of ‘Welsh’ poems, often linking to coal mining family connections. The recreation of the coal-man deliveries (when there were such things):
Stooped under a sack of coke
he swings it by its ears into the bunker
with a rumble like thunder                                                                           
                                                 (“Coal”)
 
and an innocent question leads to tales of rats as big as cats in the mines. This is a child’s eye view, a child used to observing all the nuances of human behaviour and decoding them, often to protect a vulnerable parent.
[...]
And in “Five Foot in her Slippers”, which describes the mother in hospital, elderly and reverting to schoolteacher mode in her confusion, the last line is the telling observation, ‘Her perm squashed flat at the back’, with its customary clear-sighted compassion."

“Who knew that the past could be so exciting? Here it all is, with all its life and wonder and joys and tragedies - open these pages and step on in”.-- Jonathan Edwards
 
“Judith Wozniak’s Making Dolmades in Essex brims with moving recollection. Beautifully gathered, a woman shares the encounters that have shaped her and the result is warm, insightful, lasting.”  — Rebecca Goss

Neil Leadbeater reviews Making Dolmades in Essex in Littoral Magazine Issue 31 (September 2024):

Making Dolmades in Essex  by Judith Wozniak
ISBN 978-1-917101-05-9
RRP £9.99.
Available to order from the author https://www.judithwozniak.co.uk