Letting Go

World rights

"The poems of Letting Go engage the reader with their shaped sense of familial experience. In clear and crafted language the poet opens a heart-door on the pluses and minuses of life, revealing the flow of time and love through the generations. A beautifully judged collection." - Penelope Shuttle, poet and author

"Angela Topping’s poems tug at the threads of motherhood and daughterhood, and lay bare the complicated business of family. They speak of what sometimes can’t be said — when words are rags. These are gentle, honest poems that honour the small sorrows and joys of everyday lives. It is impossible to resist the power of such tender declarations of love." - Martin Figura, poet, teacher and photographer

"Reading Letting Go is something like looking through a treasure trove of family history, discovering lost letters and photographs of never-known relatives and in so doing understanding something more of who you are."

FOR BOOKS' SAKE

"Angela has ten other poetry pamphlets and collections on her CV, she is what I think of as a proven poet. When I read her work I am not analysing it in the way that, thanks to years of studying, I do with some poetry, I am sitting back and enjoying the gift. I am being given something beautiful to handle and enjoy, something tactile and familiar. There’s a sense of confidence and patience within the poems, a feeling of safety, a feeling that here is a poet who absolutely knows what she is doing and she is getting it right in every poem."

Wendy Pratt for INK, SWEAT AND TEARS

Angela Topping is a poet and author with seven poetry collections from Stride, bluechrome, Salt, Lapwing and Mother’s Milk Books. Her three pamphlets include one from Rack Press in 2011. Angela is a poetry expert, with a background in education (teaching English and Drama from 1992 – 2009). She has co-authored textbooks on poetry for Oxford University Press and written several critical books for Greenwich Exchange. She has carried about many poets in schools all over the country. Angela collaborated with artist Maria Walker and their work has toured Cheshire and appeared in Scotland. Some of the poems from The Lightfoot Letters exhibition are included in Letting Go. In 2013, she won first prize in Buzzwords competition and in 2012 was highly commended in the Cheshire High Sherriff’s prize for Children’s Literature. Her work has appeared in over 60 anthologies published by Macmillan, OUP, Red Squirrel, Collins and many others. She has edited and co-edited several anthologies, for example Sculpted: Poems of The North West (2013) and The Robin Hood Book (2012), which was a book of protest poems against the austerity cuts. In 2013, she was awarded a prestigious residency at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, where she led a workshop and led two evening events, as well as developing new poems.

More about Angela can be found here: http://angelatopping.wordpress.com