Roz Goddard - Small Moon Curve

We are absolutely delighted to announce that we have Roz Goddard joining us here at The Heath Bookshop. Roz will be talking about her book 'Small Moon Curve'. She will be interviewed by Liz Berry.

Roz and Liz will be in conversation for around an hour. There will then be a book signing afterwards.

Roz Goddard is a poet and teacher. Her poetry collection, Lost City, was published in 2020, by The Emma Press. Previous short collections have been published by Nine Arches Press and Flarestack Poets. She was a finalist for the Moth Poetry Prize in 2022 and works as a poetry mentor for The Poetry Society. Her forthcoming collection, Small Moon Curve, will be published in 2024 by Nine Arches Press. She is currently training for ordination in the Triratna Buddhist Order. She is a former poet laureate of Birmingham. 

Small Moon Curve:

Small Moon Curve is an intimate poetry memoir exploring what it means to ease open to the restorative powers of love, faith and beauty following diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. In this compelling, tender and deeply moving testimony, the narrator discovers a surprising and powerful affinity with Tess of the D’Urbervilles – as spiritual companion and guide through the challenging currents of illness, trauma and transformation.

This collection considers the stories we inherit, those we tell ourselves – and power of stories to rescue and renew us in a moment where “the world outside, the coming dawn, can only be reached by crossing a terrible sea”. From a Buddhist retreat, to the nighttime depths of a maternity suite and the dark waters of a South Wales reservoir, Goddard’s beautiful and sensitive poems study what it means to step into the wild river of ourselves – and feel alive. Here, poetry is way to hold and examine the things we are fearful of, and to find compassion and resolve in order to make peace with our past and live fully in our present.

Praise for Small Moon Curve:

‘Roz Goddard is one of my favourite poets and Small Moon Curve shines with all that I admire in her poems: mystery, beauty, deep tenderness and a willingness to venture into the dark and light it with love.’ – Liz Berry 

'The poems of Small Moon Curve address grief, fear, illness, and loss, but turn into the force of those experiences as if to lift upon them like a wing, making them also – at one and the same time – poems of life and wonder. This transmutation is at the heart of a book in which language both tracks and enacts a form of recovery, searching the dream of consciousness, the translations of memory, and visceral feeling, ‘where truth is awake’.' - Gregory Leadbetter

‘When it comes to coping with carcinogenic cells in our body, how can we tell it like it is? ‘Should we tell our secrets, Tess . . .’ asks the poet of Hardy’s fictional heroine. In this centred and sensitive collection, Roz Goddard certainly does tell secrets, with both tenderness and triumph, making them timeless, universal, and even useful, especially to anyone who’s been through it.’ - Matt Holland

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Her debut collection, Black Country, 'a sooty hymn to her native West Midlands', (Guardian), won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018. Her latest book, "The Home Child" is inspired by a true story, a beautiful novel-in-verse about a child far from home.

As always, we look forward to seeing you. 

Catherine & Claire