The Guest Room
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The Guest Room, Diana Hendry’s second collection of poems from Worple Press, continues her always perceptive explorations of family, childhood and finding oneself, encounters with people (whether neighbours or strangers) and animals (pets or otherwise). Added to this is her embracing of Seamus Heaney’s notion of poetry paying attention to the world, here including climate change, coronavirus, political prisoners, Palestine and the health service, for example – never preachy, telling it slant. There’s pleasure to be found throughout, in her craft and characteristic wry humour and in what U.A. Fanthorpe called her ‘remarkable eye for the truth and an ability to see the otherness in the ordinary.’
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The Guest Room, Diana Hendry’s second collection of poems from Worple Press, continues her always perceptive explorations of family, childhood and finding oneself, encounters with people (whether neighbours or strangers) and animals (pets or otherwise). Added to this is her embracing of Seamus Heaney’s notion of poetry paying attention to the world, here including climate change, coronavirus, political prisoners, Palestine and the health service, for example – never preachy, telling it slant. There’s pleasure to be found throughout, in her craft and characteristic wry humour and in what U.A. Fanthorpe called her ‘remarkable eye for the truth and an ability to see the otherness in the ordinary.’
Comments on Diana’s previous Worple collection, The Watching Stair:
‘a collection of poignant, often wryly humorous and always beautifully crafted poems…’ – Vicki Feaver
‘accessible, highly intelligent, wide-ranging poems that have a wonderful psychological truthfulness’ – D. M. Black
Before Us
And so we came to this English village
and were glad of a house with a hedge all round,
a bit of wall and a window high enough to serve
as post-war look-out – though there was nothing to see
but the ordinary of school, church, sea – most
of it shuddered and shaken by what had happened.
We were mismatched, disconnected like many
but we shook down, planned to make something
of ourselves (though we didn’t know what) thought
it a good place to grow our three girls despite
the grief that exuded from the walls like damp
which we couldn’t get rid. We knew its source
in the man who’d sold us the house – a doctor
they said – father to the three boys who’d lived
here before us. All killed in the war. All.
One two three like Macduff’s chicks and not
one saved. Still, for us it was a beginning.
We took them on, adopted kin, a lineage.
Published: 7 November 2022
ISBN: 978-1905208487
Pages: 76
“works vividly at every level […] The seduction, and the threat, of the outside world – in essence, the wilderness – runs like a stream through The Guest Room. In contrast to the many domestic settings of home, childhood, adult life, it insists on its own powers, harnessed by Hendry but still delightfully out of control. […] a book both rich in meaning and resistant to easy readings” – James Roderick Burns. Read the full review at London Grip
“Hers is a humour both sharp and affectionate. […] These poems easily pass their RAT (Read Aloud Test). You don’t falter or lose track. I’ve not read a book like this for some time, one I could give to non-poet friends knowing they would recognise much in the down-to-earth and everyday life written here and relish the nimble wit and good cheer of the writing.” – Jane Routh. Read the full review at The Friday Poem
Diana Hendry grew up by the sea on the Wirral peninsular. The Watching Stair (2018) is her first collection with Worple Press. She’s published five other full collections including The Seed-Box Lantern: New & Selected Poems, two pamphlets – the most recent being Where I Was 2020 – and a joint publication with Douglas Dunn and Vicki Feaver (Second Wind, Saltire Soc). She’s won first prize in the Stroud International Poetry Competition and the Houseman Society Poetry Competition and (with Hamish Whyte) was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship.
Of her forty-plus children’s books, ‘Harvey Angell’ won a Whitbread Award and her YA novel ‘The Seeing’ was short-listed for a Costa Award. Her books have been dramatised and read on BBC radio. Diana has also published a collection of short stories, ‘My Father as an Ant’ and has had a number of stories published in journals and read on the BBC.
She’s been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow based at Edinburgh University; a Writer-in-Residence at Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary and a co-editor of New Writing Scotland. For a number of years she’s reviewed fiction for The Spectator. She’s assistant editor of Mariscat Press and lives in Edinburgh.
