Angela Topping

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Biographical note:  Angela Topping is the author of three solo poetry collections from reputable publishers, and one children’s collection from Salt. She has edited two books and is the co-author of several GCSE English Literature textbooks for OUP. She has written two critical books for Greenwich Exchange, with a third in the pipeline. After a career in teaching she now writes full time. Married with two adult daughters, she lives in Cheshire.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718214
ISBN:  9781844718214
Author:  Angela Topping
Title:  I Sing of Bricks
Series:  Salt Modern Voices
Product class:  BF
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jan-11
Extent:  52pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  4 mm
Weight:  78 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 6.5
Price:  USD 9.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Angela Topping’s poems are full of joy, tempered by sadness and always unflinchingly honest. She writes in a range of voices, always concentrating on the human experience, sometimes through unusual routes, like bricks, shoes, a single glove.

Main description:  Angela Topping’s poems are full of joy, tempered by sadness and always unflinchingly honest. She writes in a range of voices, always concentrating on the human experience, sometimes through unusual routes, like bricks, shoes, a single glove. These are poems in which the senses inform the striking imagery, where love is measured in actualities, and observation is close and truthful. Her feet are firmly rooted to the earth, though her head may be full of dreams and memories. Her working class childhood combined with her subsequent immersion in Literature, and passion for writing from an early age, combine to make her work accessible as well as poetically exciting. I Sing of Bricks is her fourth book for adults. If you have not yet been converted to her magical poetry, this chapbook is a wonderful introduction.

Table of contents:
I Sing of Bricks
Shoes
Glove
Romance in Middle Age
Driving Away From You
In His Eyes
Holiday Market
Sunset over Galway Bay
Johari Whispers
Twilight
Last Swim
Hospital Visiting
Bypass
Keeping Faith
Rosemary Chapel
Severance
Coping
All Saints
Atlantic Whale Fishing
Snakewatching
Those Forgotten
Each Blade Singly
Heron
Three Ways of Snowdrops
Gardening at Sylvia’s
The Cook’s Tale
Bildungsroman
Kitchen Ghosts
Words of Love
One for the Album
How to Capture a Poem

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Excerpt from book:  

Shoes

Shoes wear the imprint of the foot:
each separate toe burned to insole
sepia tinted, developed slowly
like an old photograph.

Worn shoes meld to every bone;
describe their author’s feet,
eloquent in every crease
and scuff, each clatter, squeak.

Breath from a shoe’s open mouth
is signature musk, intimate, cheesy.
To wear another’s shoes is
trespass, betrayal, infidelity.

Mary Janes or winkle-pickers,
patent or suede, sensible or stiletto,
zany red or sultry purple, silver
corset-laced platform boots.

You put your best foot forward,
giving yourself away: dancing,
marching, shuffling, you’re printing,
for all to read, your secret name.

Unpublished endorsement:  Angela Topping has the knack of making the reader see things anew, of reinventing lyrical forms, and of disarming sceptics like myself with the ‘unexpected love’ which occurs throughout this carefully ordered and original work.

Rupert Loydell

Unpublished endorsement:  These are poems that come alive as they negotiate the small details that make meaning in a life, meeting the end of love and
lives with compassion and feeling

Deryn Rees Jones

Unpublished endorsement:  A husband abandons thrift in a small, sudden gesture of love. Two people swim together for the last time, but the unspoken back-story stays under the surface. In a basement kitchen, a cook creates a world of sensual colour.

Poems that start in places like these are sometimes dismissed as "anecdotal", but that is a mistake. Most unforgettable, transcendent moments happen in quite commonplace surroundings, which is just as well, since that is where most of us live. We need to find our meanings, our significance, in just such places, and it is one of the things poems like these can help us do.

Sheenagh Pugh

Unpublished endorsement:  Angela Topping sings of bricks and cups and perfect grapes. She sings of the concrete, the power of objects, like a spell to ward off loss.

Helen Ivory

Unpublished endorsement:  Angela Topping's poems are deceptively simple, singing modern lullabies to the bottomless hole left in hearts by death and absence, by the failure of speech and love. Her work examines hurt without flinching, in a poetry that does not prevaricate or make pretty patterns with language where only straight-talking will answer.

Jane Holland