Cracking on: Poems on Ageing by Older Women - Tapa blanda

This fine anthology has given women permission to say exactly what they feel about every aspect of the whole business of ageing. These poets aren t fools: they know what they re talking about, and they tell it straight. They have the courage to face the hard things; they have the grace and skill to write without self-pity and yet with the true voice of feeling. It is seriously good poetry: fresh, and well-crafted. It s the fruit of accumulated wisdom and of long life-experience - brave writing, full of love and subversive wit and lyricism. You can trust such poems. --R V Bailey

Brave, thoughtful, humorous...the poems in this book explore with honesty and clear-sightedness the gains and losses and the surprises inherent in the process of ageing. --Carole Satyamurti

Electric, formidable, challenging, witty, sombre, enduring, heart-felt, tender, reflective, valedictory poems. This is an anthology to see you through the bad times, to celebrate the good times. Be these poets stricken with grief or still dizzy with love after all these years, they remain sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, gutsy and dauntless in their many different approaches. --Penelope Shuttle

This new anthology explores all aspects of ageing, from losing parents to confronting the inevitability of our own deaths. Here are poets facing up to life, with a recognition of its transience, absurdities, triumphs and disasters, in the spirit of taking it on the chin