Kerry Darbishire lives with her husband in Cumbria where most of her poetry is rooted. Her two full collections were published by Indigo Dreams: A Lift of Wings( 2014) and Distance Sweet on my Tongue (2018). Her biography Kay’s Ark was published by Handstand Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared widely in anthologies and magazines.  She has been placed in competitions, and recently gained 2nd prize in Folklore and was commended in Grey Hen and Ware Poets competitions 2021; some of her work will be performed by The Cumbria Opera Group’s Lakeland Cycle in September 2021. She was joint winner of the Hedgehog Press Full Fat Collection prize in 2021.

In her new poetry pamphlet, A Window of Passing Shadow, Kerry Darbishire presents two groups of poems:  in ‘Studio air’ she focuses mainly on imagery from the paintings she loves in galleries and in ‘Plein air’ she writes from her love of the landscape in the hills of her home in Cumbria. There are ekphrastic poems in both sections of the book, bearing witness to her strongly visual sensibility and her ability to create vivid word-pictures in her poems. The beautiful painting on the front cover of the book is by her husband, Steve Darbishire RBA, an accomplished professional painter.

A Window of Passing Light by Kerry Darbishire

‘These delicate and poised poems map the shifting lights that fall between art and life. They can be unexpected, moving in and out of paintings, speaking of (and as) both painter and model, of open ground and the secrecy of closed rooms. Paint is touch here – on both sides of the brush. The call and response across space, time and various inner lives is anchored to the physicality of paint, textile, body and landscape, showing the poet’s gift for ‘finding home on paper’ for the many subtleties of relationship between people and place.’
— Judy Brown

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‘Subtle, playful, delightful. Using pictures as catalysts for empathy and self-knowledge. Darbishire explores how time and experience move sinuously in art. Like the artist described, she ‘wastes no time making real. ’Don’t cheat’ one poem urges us ‘Don’t rely on guesswork. Observe.’
-- Heidi Williamson

‘As painterly as the images they respond to, these deft poems draw us in and invite us to ‘Imagine/walking over the surface and the brush/is a journey’. Exterior landscape illuminating interior life, Kerry Darbishire’s sensitive consideration of art and artists, subjects and speakers, reveals rewarding new perspectives with each subsequent reading.’
Sarah Doyle (Pre-Raphaelite Society Poet-in-Residence)

‘Observe/never make a mark without first looking’ Kerry Darbishire writes in her vivid and richly lyrical collection – A Window of Passing Light. And these are appropriate words for a poet with remarkable skills of observation and recall and the ability to paint ‘Sunday green lawns flowing into a wood’, a ‘swollen moon’, orange flowers in a delft vase’, ‘heather lifting off the moor’, ‘colour settling like corncrakes to nesting ground’, and all manner of nature’s wonders so adeptly and evocatively the pages come alive. Kerry is a writer of great range, and the poems are at times imagistic, at times narrative, and often confessional with such a power in that which is illuminated we perhaps should heed the warning in the poem, ‘First Sitting’ – ‘don’t be afraid of storm light’. The strongest collection to date, from a gifted poet.’
— Anna Saunders. co-founder of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival

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ISBN 978-1-913329-60-0
2021
Paperback, 36 pages, 148x210mm
​RRP £8.00

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