Nightingale & Sparrow

Tag: All the Shades of Grief

  • All the Shades of Grief by Ellora Sutton

    All the Shades of Grief
    by Ellora Sutton

    Publication Date: 8 September 2020
    Nightingale & Sparrow Press

    Genre: Poetry

    Borrowing from nature, art, mythology, and personal memory, All the Shades of Grief represents an attempt to articulate the universal language of loss. From the death of a loved one to watching flying ants dying on the pavement, each poem in this chapbook seeks to confront grief and force it into the light as something we must all experience and exorcise.

    Some of the poems refer directly to the personally seismic event of the death of the poet’s mother, such as an honest rehashing of ‘The Five Stages of Grief’. Others deal with grief and loss in a more ‘everyday’ way, trying to encompass all the myriad shapes (or ‘shades’) of grief that we go through, the kind that can creep up and breathe down your neck with no warning whatsoever, the reverberations that never quite go away. Poems such as ‘Apollo and Hyacinth’ and the first-place prize-winning ‘Daphne’ translate death and loss from ancient mythology to modern-day relevance. This book doesn’t seek to tell you that everything will be alright, that the pain will go away – rather, it wants to hold your hand and feel it all right beside you, to whisper in your ear that you are not alone.

    All the Shades of Grief is part coping-mechanism, part moonlit-wondering, and a whole heart, trying to heal itself.

    Print | PDF | Kindle

    Zoom Launch

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    From Ellora: “Please join me for an evening of poetry readings to christen my debut chapbook, All the Shades of Grief. There will be readings from poets Jack Cooper, Nadia Lines, and Kevin Kissane, as well as readings from All the Shades of Grief. I am so excited to share my first book with you all. Come and enjoy an evening of free poetry!”

    Tickets available here

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    Previously Published Pieces:

    Take a sneak peek at some of the poems included in this chapbook: 

    About the Author

    ellora-sutton

    Ellora Sutton is a Creative Writing MA student living and working in Hampshire, England. Her work has previously been published in Nightingale & Sparrow, The Cardiff Review, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, The Hellebore, Poetry News, Honey & Lime, and Eye Flash Poetry Journal, among others. She has been commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize and has been a winner of several Young Poets Network challenges. Her favourite things to write about include badass women, art, nature, and death. She only feels like herself when she’s writing.

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  • An excerpt from All the Shades of Grief

    On the anniversary of Van Gogh’s death

    You, who wielded yellow not like a weapon
    but like a looking glass. Did you find it?
    The ochre on the inside of starry eyes,
    in the yawning mouths of terminal flowers,
    the hay in the buttery shade of cypress trees?

    You, who forged blue into an ocean of tiny suns,
    burning Paris back to itself on the wings of crows
    scouring away their heartfelt blacknesses and cawing
    in that moment, forever. The people in your paintings
    always have such heavy shoulders.

    It must have been unbearable.

    from All the Shades of Grief

  • Author Statement: All the Shades of Grief

    Dear Reader,

    As I sit here, looking out my window at ferns and nettles dancing in the British rain, it occurs to me for the first time that the publication of my debut chapbook is a somewhat bittersweet occasion. Sweet, of course, for the obvious reasons. Bitter, because the one person I want to share it with most will never get to read it. Allow me to use this space to tell you a bit about that person, that such a person once existed.

    My mother, Victoria Sutton, was a deeply remarkable woman. She was a teacher. She read me bedtime stories. She would write down the stories I told her, long before I fully understood what an author was. Every blouse she owned was purple. The only thing she could cook was spaghetti bolognaise. She took me to see a big Van Gogh exhibition in London. She showed me a beachfront in Italy where she fell in love once. She could always win something out of those arcade claw machines. She loved Peter Andre. She wrote I love you in the front of every book she ever bought me. Above all else she was unwaveringly and profoundly kind, a kindness of sorts that very few possess. Often, when I think of her now, I think of her before I knew her – as a teenager, charming her way across the US to visit James Dean’s grave; hiding a stranger from the police in the boot of her bright pink beetle; wearing bottle after bottle of Bodyshop perfume.

    There is no way of dressing this up. She died when I was fifteen, after four years of a cancer that was supposed to have killed her within weeks of diagnosis. Death is rarely a truly peaceful process. For those left behind there is a cacophony that births a tinnitus that never completely dissipates. The poems in All the Shades of Grief give form to my own personal tinnitus. They are not all about the death of my mother but rather they are all coloured by the background noise of that grief, as everything is and always will be for me.

    The result is, I hope, not intensely depressing but honest. And kind, like her.

    All my love,
    Ellora x