Jude Neale continues her exploration of life via graceful ageing. Gathered in Pockets, her 13th poetry volume contrasts the sad realities of our human fate with revelations of beauty:...flakes of snow to the tip of your lash/You take something humble/and it becomes grand... The book invites us to lie awake and be at where we hide our pain/The world is on edge, in a poignant and prescient statement of contemporary geo-political conditions. Overall, I was taken by its gentle leadings: ...night is long/a blink away—/dawn shivers…
Dennis E Bolen,
Amaranthine Chevroleto.

Lean into November’s
quiet cold mist.

A sacred baptism,

with each tongue
of winter’s tide.

Poetry is a gathering of moments—fragments of breath, memory, and feeling woven into something that lingers beyond the page. It is both an excavation and a prayer, a reaching toward understanding.

This collection was written across seasons of loss, love, and quiet revelation. Some pieces arrived gently, like fallen leaves. Others were torn from the marrow. Each one holds a story, a whisper, or a wound.

May you find yourself in these words, may they stir something familiar, and may they remind you of the luminous threads that bind us all.

With gratitude,
Jude Neale