Pamphlet 32 pages £5
ISBN 978-1-909404-22-9
Publication date 1st December 2015
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Wendy Stern was born in London in 1964. She eventually settled in Bristol, where she died in 2015. During the last five years of her life Wendy began to write poetry, which became her passion and her principal form of creativity and self-expression. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines, printed and online. One of them, “To the Buddha,” was set to music by the American composer Perry Townsend.
Completely bedridden because of a debilitating illness, Wendy compiled her poems without the capacity to look at text or to use a pen or a keyboard. She would dictate them and then edit them aurally, a process involving an immense amount of energy and concentration.
This book contains a selection of her work. Most of what she wrote can be found at www.kshanti-poems.uk.
“To encounter Wendy Stern’s poetry is to experience a heightened sense of an existence both fleeting and sacred. Her poems offer us starkly profound meanings, rooted in pain but flowering in the sublime. We cannot but be grateful to Wendy for having looked so unflinchingly into the very core of suffering and reported back so honestly. These words can change lives. They did mine.” Jason Barber, Editor, Buddhist Poetry Review
Two of Wendy’s poems were commended in Poetry Space Competition 2015 and John Siddique said of these:
“Brave, real, courageous and loving” (Pieces of Suffering) and “Yes to the sentiment, yes to the energy of this poem.” (The Challenge) These will be published in the Prize winners’ anthology 2015.
Sample poems:
Trapped on the inside
Life came to me today,
Through my window,
All feathers and passion,
With more colour, intensity, swiftness and determination
Than perhaps I’ve ever known before.
It perched, finally,
Trapped on the inside for once,
And it looked at me.
I spoke to it, calming it,
And then I set it free.
Life came to me today,
Trapped on the inside for once.
I set it free…
Bad day china
China
Once precious
Once fragile
So delicate
In tiny pieces
Tiny pieces
Before us
Always
Another breath
Arising from the last one
Always
Another breath
Emerging from the pain of it
China
Once precious
Once fragile
So delicate
In tiny pieces
Tiny pieces
And breathing
