'Conversations' by Julia Duke
Available to order from the author 

Drawing on her own experience of relationships plus her observations of others, Julia Duke provides thought-provoking, poignant and often humorous insights into the whole complex subject of our attempts to get on with one another. An encounter that sets the nerves jangling with a self-important trainee teacher in a café in Aberystwyth, a reunion of close friends from vastly different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, an unsettling conversation with a homeless person on the streets of Norwich, a close-up of mother and father in those all-important early years of childhood combine together to ask the question: what is it that promotes or destroys the experience of intimacy in our lives?

“Julia Duke’s attentive ear and perceptive eye inform her observational poetry which seeks out elusive meanings in the ebb and flow of every-day social encounters; meanwhile her lively imagination makes her equally adept at inferring possible stories and emotional baggage lying behind the static interactions within the paintings which inspire her well-made ekphrastic poems.” 
— Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, poetry editor, London Grip

“These poems are precision lenses. Through them Julia Duke  draws  on experience and art to examine human relationships in close-up. She reflects on the living  and the dead,long - term  relationships and  fleeting  encounters  in  her  examination of  ‘the stuff  the world is made  of’.   Beginning  with  wonder  and  love  for  a  new - born  baby,  she  also considers couples, cocktail drinkers, wrestlers,  counsellors  and  friends.       In most  poems,  ‘humanity  oozes   from   every   pore’,   though   she’s  astute  at  noticing   gaps  and  ‘mis-meetings’.  Julia's  poems  leave  her  readers  enlightened,  aware of what is really taking place in Conversations, through her perceptive but kindly lens. ”
— Chris Kinsey, poet and creative writing tutor

“Human connection runs through these poems like the strong knots that bind  together the   complex   patterns   of   a   Persian   carpet.    Friends,  lovers,  partners  meet,  enjoy, sometimes  lose  each  other  and  gain  rueful  insights  into  the inevitable sadness that ‘somewhere  down  the  line /we strayed and lost our way’. All of the handful of  poems that reference  another work  of  art  bring  us a fresh understanding of that artist’s depiction of  the  human  condition.   Matisse’s  wife  wears  a blouse that ‘simpers’ - a  flash of the insight that lights up this poem and all the poems in this fine collection.”
-- Kate Foley, president, Suffolk Poetry Society 

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ISBN: ​978-1-913329-58-7
2021
148 x 210mm, 36 pages
RRP £8.00

Julia Duke is a nature writer and poet whose writing is informed by her love of landscape and her fellow humans. Fascinated by all kinds of connections and borders, between both individuals and nations, Julia has lived in and been inspired by a variety of locations and their inhabitants across England, Wales and the Netherlands. 

juliadukewriting.wordpress.com