Linda Rose Parkes

Linda Rose Parkes studied literature at U.E.A and lived in Germany for 19 years where she taught adult education and performed with song writers and musicians. She continues to run poetry workshops in Jersey, her native Channel Island, was co-editor of Wavelengths, the first Channel Island poetry anthology and has published three collections with Hearing Eye: 'The Usher's Torch', 'Night Horses' and 'Familiars'.

"Elusive magic, the poet is ‘Schehezerade of the Thousand and One Nights’. One more sip, one more shadow to pass through…" — Sarah Law on ‘The Usher’s Torch’ in Orbis
“Parkes’s relentless eye misses nothing, but control is masterly. A bravely candid voice, a deft searcher under surfaces.” -- Katherine Gallagher on ‘Night Horses’ in Artemis
"Linda Rose Parkes's ‘Familiars’ is dark and scintillating, rich with life and dense with mingled rage and longing." — Bethany W. Pope's review of ‘Familiars’ in Ofi Press 44
"There is an excellent weirdness in these poems which makes them distinctive, unique even." -- Martin Crucefix
"This is a fine collection in every sense: finely-wrought and detailed as well as beautiful. Through language of ringing clarity, she makes us unsure of ourselves, and so gives us back to ourselves, with new understanding."-— Tanja Nightingale, Dream Catcher ('Familiars')

THIS CLOSE by Linda Rose Parkes
'This Close' is Linda Rose Parkes's fourth collection. The cover of 'This Close' is based on her painting, 'The Swimmer'.

“We are lucky these poems are tethered to the page by ink because they want to run, float, fly from the paper into a Chagall sky, voluptuous with possibility. Linda Rose Parkes writes as she paints – with generosity, wonder and luminous colour.”
– Helen Ivory

ISBN 978-1907435-68-3
2018
Perfect-bound paperback
148 x 210mm
87 pages

RRP £10.00

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DIVING FOR PEARLS by Linda Rose Parkes

ISBN 978-1-913329-64-8
2022
Perfect-bound paperback
148 x 210mm

RRP £10.00
Available from 4th April 2022

Mandy Pannett reviews This Close in Sentinal Journal, Spring 2019

"Linda Rose Parkes mixes myth, fairy tale, song, rhyme and narrative. Sometimes the allusions are subtle. In A little crime that lives we are told of a mysterious ‘she’ who is ‘small-boned as Goldilocks’ and the ‘crime’ is the theft of her ‘good girl crown’ which adorned ‘her lovely tresses’. A lost shoe takes the image of ill-fitting footwear and extends it into a metaphor for spirituality, a soul that is forced to ‘limp/towards the hope of a better/when one foot is shorn/of a glass slipper.’ All dressed up in her sea-green bow is delightful to read, musical and enchanting with echoes of Elizabethan songs and The Owl and the Pussy Cat and, one of my favourites in this selection, Exuberances: an assay, is witty and innovative in its associations, rhymes, musicality and form.
Darker moods and attitudes feature in this close and there is negativity, secrecy, absence and death. The figure who runs in her nightdress through the dark is ‘thin as air’ and ‘the cold blows through’, the narrator who drifts towards her has not come to light her way home with a lamp nor strew ‘luminous petals’ on the path. Late night music overheard from a neighbouring house is the moment ‘the dead slip in’ – the same dead who yearn for the comfort of everyday things but who end with empty hands reaching out for ‘a cup of tarnished sunlight.’ (A glass of water).
This is a beautiful collection and one I’d strongly recommend. What I am left with, most of all, is an impression of salvation, a feeling of hope, a great deal of love. If you only have chance to read a few poems in this close then immerse yourself in the final half a dozen, the poignancy of them, their tenderness."

We are very sad to announce the death of Linda Rose Parkes after a short illness, in St Helier, Jersey in March 2022.

It was in 2018 that we first met Linda. We were at the Torriano Meeting House in Kentish Town, London, launching one of our books. Linda sat in the front row of the audience, with that special aura that she seemed to carry around: warm, smiling, welcoming people to communicate with her. We included an open mic in the launch and Linda read a poem. It was the best reading of the whole evening and we told her so. We were thrilled when she asked us if we’d like to consider publishing her next book, and This Close came into being and was launched in October 2018, with a cover based on Linda’s painting of the same title.

Linda launched This Close at the Jersey Opera House and we were invited over from Guildford to stay with Linda and Mike for a few nights. She invited Dónall to read a set of his own poems as a guest at the launch, alongside several Jersey poets. The launch was a splendid occasion, with music by Mike and his group, cupcakes with the cover design of This Close printed on the icing, and of course a lot of wine.

We had a wonderful time: it was our first visit to Jersey and Linda showed us around St Helier on foot, her energetic, athletic walk leading us like a Pied Piper through its streets.
She drove us around the island and took us to her favourite beach. The weather that October was beautiful, and though it was too cold for me to want to swim, Linda and Dónall stripped down to their underwear and swam out to sea while I paddled at the edge. It was a magical afternoon—Linda had a way of spreading magic.

Our two evenings in St Helier we spent lounging on sofas at home, drinking wine and talking about poetry. In the mornings we woke to the twittering of the finches who roosted in the bamboo outside the window. We could not have believed, if we’d been told, that Linda Rose Parkes, this vibrant, creative soul, would be lost to us within three years of that visit.

When in the late summer of 2021 Linda asked us to publish another book, our excitement was shadowed by her simultaneous news that she had been diagnosed with cancer. We read the new manuscript and were impressed by the depth and strength of the poems there. The months of pandemic and lockdown had contributed to that, and her awareness of her own enhanced physical fragility must have been heightened, too. We accepted her proposal and her request that Diving for Pearls be published in the April of 2022, with hope that the treatment she was undergoing would have been at least partially successful by then.

As we worked on editing Diving for Pearls we did our best to avoid putting any pressure on Linda. The treatment she was undergoing left her more and more weak but we hoped against hope that it was working. The layout of the book had taken its final shape in February. Linda had sent us the cover image already: her painting, Sirens. In the final weeks of her life, the layout of the front cover was the main subject of the emails between us: the vertical layout of the title was her last wish to us. Within days we had the final sad news.

We feel proud and privileged to have known Linda Rose Parkes and to have published her last two poetry collections—unfailingly professional, she was a strong, talented, creative and warm person.
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Her good friend, the poet Sue Hubbard, wrote the following obituary in memory of Linda.

"Linda and I became friends when I was running an organisation in London called Blue Nose Poets. We ran a competition and she agreed to co-ordinate the Jersey arm. Our friendship was based on poetry, red lipstick and what she liked to called ‘bubbles’. I always brought some from the airport when I visited her in Jersey. She was fun, stylish and deep thinking, enjoying a bit of fashion and razzmatazz, along with a nice restaurant or two. But, there was a quiet, reflective side and, ultimately, it was this serious engagement with her work as a poet and, more latterly as an artist, along with a commitment to her family that really mattered.

We became poetry buddies. Mutually emailing poems backwards and forwards between Jersey and London for the other to critique. As a poet it is rare to find someone one both trusts and respects enough with whom to do this on a regular basis. She was generous, perceptive and tough, having spent many years teaching in adult education and running poetry workshops. Like me, she did the MA at the University of East Anglia, but not at the same time. I honestly believe that we both wrote better poems as a result of this exchange and it’s an aspect of our friendship that will be sorely missed.

As a poet she was honest and daring, tender and lyrical, domestic yet adventurous. There was a sensuality to her work that existed very much in the everyday world, yet her imagination would often take flight and soar to unexpected places. Her poems always pushed to the edges of themselves, reaching for more than might be expected of them. Never settling. She peered beneath surfaces, journeying into unknown terrains, exploring what was hidden, lost or half-remembered. Both as a poet and painter, she had an unerring eye and missed nothing. She was ambitious, technically adroit and wholly knowledgeable. Her poems were charged with moments of loss and redemption, occasionally with what was fearful. But they always came back to what was important to her: to relationships, to how to live in the natural world, to the human condition."
Sue Hubbard, March 2022