Released 30th September, 2024 // 68 pages // 978-1-916938-46-5 // RRP £11.99
I Make You Bird is a heart-wrenching testimony to the power of love and the strength of enduring grief. Diana Cant writes with exquisite honesty about loss and living with a new reality. Her poems are a testament to love and the need for healing, to finding ways of understanding what death means to the living and finding what it means to be alive. These poems are about facing down fear and loss to keep living, but they also hold out the possibility that love is something we carry inside ourselves and can be kept alive in the memory of another.
PRAISE for I Make You Bird:
Though Diana Cant’s vivid and encompassing I Make You Bird is ostensibly a book of elegy, it chronicles love and loss with such metaphorical reach that its form is really spiral: the beloved is gone, but the love is back, beginning, re-beginning in every poem. Home and garden sprout such joy and melancholy that we seem to be on a slowly turning planet, neighbourly, consoling, where the claims of dream and delight more than match the claims of time.
— Glyn Maxwell
Diana Cant is a poet who has written with great compassion and care about fragile and difficult lives. Now she turns her attention to the pain of losing a long-term partner to a terminal illness – a tough subject she faces with characteristic openness and generosity. I Make You Bird is a soaring collection charting the path of grief and rebirth, and a beautiful and eloquent testament to how we hold those we love in our hearts – even when they are no longer present.
— Tamar Yoseloff
It takes courage to hold onto living in the face of dying. Those of us who work and struggle with the impossibilities of grief in the aftermath of traumatic loss might make more space for the power of poetry, the imagination and our ordinary, human need to find aesthetic expression in the search for ways to bear the unbearable.
— Maggie Schaedel
ABOUT Diana Cant:
Diana Cant is a poet and child psychotherapist, living in rural Kent. Her poems have been published in various anthologies and magazines, including Agenda, The North, and Poetry News. She has published two previous pamphlets, Student Bodies, 1968, and At Risk – the lives some children live, and was voted Canterbury Peoples’ Poet in 2020. She was nominated for the Forward Prize for best individual poem, 2023, and is the winner of the Plaza Poetry Prize, 2023. She is a joint editor of The Alchemy Spoon.
