 
The new (4th) collection from Ronnie Goodyer. 76 pages. ISBN 13 978-0-9553589-0- ISBN 10 0-9553589-0-6
NOW AVAILABLE.
£5.50
a poet needs shadows as friends…………..
What do we expect from Ronnie Goodyer’s fourth collection? Honesty, humour, passion, a distinctive voice inextricably linked to the unique place of Cornwall? We expect all of that and New Words from an Old Hat delivers all of it and more.
There is a clear arc between the writing here and earlier collections. ‘September Runs’ with its assured imagery, hypnotic mirror rhyme scheme and insistent pace feels like the natural successor to ‘This June’ of Lizard Reality. There is continuity, but also a strong sense of a writer who has moved on. It is autumn now; there is still a strong pulse, but it may lead us to darker places, even to ‘the filthy floor of a disused factory.’
The ‘Old Hat’ echoes his former optimism with ‘candlelight and jasmine incense’, but the shadows here are lengthening, There is a new awareness of life’s fragility: love-making is “holding as if the world may shatter,” in the knowledge that all that we have is “A few days./ One lifetime.” Yet there is also the resolute belief that life is more than the sum of its parts – that we will leave “our silhouette in the ancestral landscape / long after we’ve departed.”
Such tension only serves to make Goodyer’s writing more authentic and humane. This is poetry that engages directly with the place and people, always looking for the narrative thread of things – whether nature or human existence. Perhaps the last line of One Day In August says it best of all, “Such beauty in a landscape of stories.”
The beauty, as St. Augustine has opined before me, is all the more enriched by the existence of the shadows and in Goodyer we have a poet brave enough to explore both – the old and the new, the shadows and the light.
Jan Fortune-Wood, Cinnamon Press, Editor: Envoi
Ronnie Goodyer's poetry is unambiguous and open - he wears his heart on his sleeve...He is a great observer of landscape and legend - at his best you can taste the salty breezes...
Patrick B. Osada, poet.
Walking through Ronnie Goodyer's poetic landscapes is like discovering a new set of senses.
Les Merton, poet and editor
More a chameleon than a lizard, Merlin's hat stirs its spell once more.
Wendy Webb, poet and editor
Reading Ronnie's poetry is like holding your tired hand in a stream of clean water and
just letting it flow over you feeling every drop of his profound insight.
Peter Tomlinson, poet and author
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Unremittingly, by the second graveyard
at far Gunwalloe, Cheryl waits for Jane.
She’s usually a few years late. It stems
from the pact on the cliffs 80 years before
she first took off, diving the headwind
from Gunwalloe Cove, crashing headlong
to the rocks and surf, forming fractured spindrift
and causing Jane to lay 5 years of flowers
and a small white cross among the thrift.
It was shortly after that she met Jane again,
firstly at night, and then in the church
among the dunes. Cheryl was always wet
and mostly bloody and Jane, in widow’s weeds,
joined her, after learning to fly in the same manner.
There are two crosses now. I placed the second
after meeting them, firstly at night, and then
in the church among the dunes.
And some days I feel like flying.
On one such selective flying day,
they will teach me to become spindrift.
You will lay the flowers and three white crosses.
I will meet you then when called.
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