Devil's Piece (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781788641890)

In Devil's Piece loss, absence, mental illness and pain are examined with a lens so clear and lucid, the heart aches. Yet in that clarity, there is a savouring of the smallest things and a permeability to love and life that creates songs of what might have been dirges. There is no dressing up of reality, no pretence that everything is well, but in these fearless, precise poems there is transformation. An exquisite collection.

The gift of Lynn's work is that in her hands the painful is not just painful, the traumatic not just traumatic - she tackles both, changes and transforms, and brings them to sensitive, clear-eyed art.

- Niall Campbell

Lynn Valentine's poems look unflinchingly at mental illness, loss and the everyday burdens of life. And yet there's always resilience there. Thanks to the acuteness of her observation and her skilful working of the language, she always succeeds in locating beauty, somehow, even in the darkest corners; as if in the heart of things, she alone knows how to find the hidden song.

- John Glenday

The loam of this collection is sown with salt as well as 'fathoms of light', yet both are broadcast with exquisite care; deftly, by the able hands of a poet who understands we need each to keep us 'afloat'.

- Cáit O'Neill McCullagh