Valerie Lynch was born in Hertfordshire, but spent many  childhood holidays visiting Dorset relatives, She now lives in a Guildford.  After completing a degree at Oxford she worked variously as an archaeologist, a teacher of economics and a psychotherapist, in a long snd varied working life. Now ninety years old, she has been writing poetry all her life and has had poems published by The Rialto and Iota, among other literary journals. "So the Sky" is her first collection: her second was published in June 2019. She is also in the process of completing a novel set in Roman Britain.

Here is a link to Karen Izod's interview with Valerie Lynch for The High Window, in which she discusses the background and inspiration for her poems:
https://thehighwindowpress.com/2019/11/09/valerie-lynch/?fbclid=IwAR3ttCCuhhkoIacTl7YzwFh-IUsWW1yYg7phVjIDYJY4BxlujS-dcl-8D1k

So the Sky

Valerie Lynch
2018

In the Time of Rabbits
​Valerie Lynch
​June 2019

ISBN: 978-1-907435-72-0
62 pages, W15cm x H21cm

RRP £8.00

“‘So the Sky’ speaks  from  the  slippery, strange and fantastical world of  the very young and very old, and the nature of what can be understood  and   communicated  across  the divides  of human experience.   Drawing  from  a  life  rooted under a Dorset sky, and lived elsewhere,  these warm, earthy poems are themselves like the finds of an  archaeologist, revealing  small  intimacies of friendships, of neighbourly acts, of belonging and alienation.

Lynch’s  style  and  form is spare, bringing a vivid energy, humour and poignancy  to  her richly observed writing.  These are poems  to  read in one sitting, and then return to with a wry smile.”
Karen Izod. 

 A Review of So the Sky by Emma Lee in The High Window April 2019
https://thehighwindowpress.com/2019/04/16/new-titles-from-dempsey-and-windle/

So the Sky is Valerie Lynch’s first collection. Although she’s written poems throughout her life, it’s only recently, after a lengthy career part of which was spent as an archaeologist and historian, she’s sought publication. The poems themselves are economical, offering images and aspects to build to a whole. This makes it difficult to quote from them because context is key. The title poem is conveniently short and can be quoted in whole:

'My next house will have a room
without a roof, so the sky
can come inside, bats fly around
and sparrows fidget about
companionably in the eaves.

And when winter comes, my friend will bring me
an oilskin hat and say, ‘If you won’t have a roof,
at least wear this.’

Its style is fairly exemplary. It uses assonance and alliterative sound patterns. The potentially twee descriptions, e.g. ‘sparrows fidget about/ companionably’, are apt in the context of the impracticality of having a roof-less room. But it’s also possible to build an image of the poem’s narrator. The friend doesn’t try to persuade the speaker to build a roof but seeks to make the vision possible by providing a waterproof hat. One senses that the narrator enjoys being in nature but may be less mobile or anticipating a reduction in mobility – the only season named is winter so the narrator could be in the winter of her life – and seeks to bring nature to her.

‘Ancestors, West Dorset’ ends on a question: ‘You come and go as you will, / but where do you call home?’ which is partially answered in ‘It’s’:

A kingfisher’s delicate vigil
above the water’s edge by Litton Cheney,
as night-time voices flutter down
from the old White Horse.
It’s the lonely Roman road
still sieving the night
for the cohorts
limping home over Askerswell,
and the dusky blue
before the dawn falls over the hills
from Lewesdon to Eggardon,
and up to Pilsdon Pen.

The place names root the poem in Dorset, but the pub’s customers making their way home is universal so even those not familiar with the Dorset landscape can still engage with the poem. Memories of growing up are interspersed with poems of landscape. In ‘Granny T.’

I cycled over to see you each day after school
to sit and not say a word, and you
not saying  word to me, just leaving me be.
This companionable silence is broken by the girl’s mother arriving to take her home. The poem ends:
They robbed me of your dying,
of its smell of urine and half-washed skin;
even the grave and giving you back
to the smell of your Dorset earth.

​The smells come as a surprise because they’ve not been set up in the opening stanzas, but they also signal a change. The girl has been excluded from the end of her grandmother’s life so is evoking her memories through smell. Whereas the gentler memories of familiarity are evoked through friendly silence. Not all memories are welcomed, e.g. in ‘Wedding’ which ended in amicable divorce:
xxxxxxxxI wish
I had worn a different hat,
but no-one actually laughed.
refuse to acknowledge
the face in the wedding photos.
I know it is how I look
but it is not myself.”

The ending injects hindsight and seeks to look for forewarnings of the future to come which wasn’t known at the time the wedding photos were taken. Although the poem looks back, the final comment keeps readers in the present so it doesn’t feel nostalgic or as if it only meant something to the writer. Another looking back poem is full of poignancy, ‘Barricades’, which starts with a group of girls, ‘marinated by nannies, nurseries and limousines’ in an Oxford college where snow has fallen outside:

'and here in my room a huddle of girls by a half-starved
fire, eating mother’s home-baked cakes.
They listen with care, they are easy and kind.
We share coal, we fraternise till it’s dark.
A gathering’s planned at the Randolph, a taxi to town;
their eyes wander, translating me into space.
I seem to have swallowed my voice,
and it aches inside.

It illustrates that working class unease, that feeling that at any moment the poem’s narrator, despite earning her place at Oxford, will be uncovered as not one of the privileged girls and forever marked as an outsider.
Waiting for publication in this case has paid off. The poems in So the Sky are spare and focused, use poetic devices in free verse form to illustrate their point and, although most are looking back in time, they do so with historian’s forensic eye.

Emma Lee’s most recent collection is Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, UK 2015), she co-edited Over Land, Over Sea: poems for those seeking refuge, (Five Leaves, UK, 2015), reviews for The Blue Nib, The High Window, The Journal, London Grip and Sabotage Reviews. She blogs  at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com.

ISBN: 978-1-907435-78-2
127 pages, W15cm x H21cm

RRP £11.00

"In the Time of Rabbits" is a large collection of Valerie Lynch's poems, many of them developed on the foundation of her first book, "So the Sky". From her earliest memories of childhood and her beloved grandmother in Dorset, to her adult relationships, happy and less so, Valerie maintains her indomitable spirit and her sure poetic voice in  this absorbing collection of memories and meditations. This is a book to read and cherish, written by a poet who  has decided, late in her busy and creative life, to publish a lifetime's poems. 

Emma Lee, Reviews Editor of 'The Blue Nib' online Literary Journal. comments:
'The poems in Valerie Lynch’s In the Time of Rabbits cover a life span from childhood through to old age or, as the title poem suggests, move from “scattered in urgent rushings/ now here, now there” to “The grass was silent and slow/ and the sun/ rarely spoke at all until after mid-day."... In the Time of Rabbits is a hefty collection, built throughout a life of 90 years (so far) and scribbled in gaps between careers in archaeology, history teaching and psychotherapy. It starts in a Dorset childhood and ends looking back from the vantage of old age.'
The whole review is here:  https://thebluenib.com/valerie-lynchs-in-the-time-of-rabbits-reviewed

Carla Scarano, reviewing in "London Grip" comments:
'New themes and expanding images and metaphors are explored in Valerie Lynch’s second collection, In the Time of Rabbits. A wider conception of family relationships and identity is developed in recollections from her childhood and adulthood. The narrative concerns a woman’s lineage that goes from her grandmother back in the 1920s to her mother’s girlhood, marriage and relationship with her husband. The crystallised roles of wife and mother are contested in the narrator’s own story which includes break-ups and new lovers. Other themes are investigated such as aging, illness, gender issues, immigrants. The collection includes ekphrastic poetry and ends with a question suggesting that what we have just read is provisional though the aesthetic pleasure the poems prompt is undeniable.... This new collection is not only rich in imageries, it also reveals a widening of Lynch’s poetic and literary horizons both in her prosody and in her perceptions. Considering her age (she is ninety-two), Valerie Lynch is the living proof of the never-ending potential of imagination that creates alternative views, new beginnings and new possibilities.' 

​Full review in London Grip: https://londongrip.co.uk/2019/08/london-grip-poetry-review-valerie-lynch/
and on our Reviews blog