About me

I'm Ros Woolner.

I sometimes write poems. I've always loved gardens. And I find writing groups valuable (I am a member of Bilston Writers and Cannon Poets).

My poetry pamphlet, On the Wing, was published by Offa's Press in August 2018 and my first full collection, Earth Walker, was published in May 2023. Many of the poems are about gardens. Both books are available from the Offa's Press shop.


"Ros Woolner can create a myth from a casual remark. This is an intelligent, imaginative collection which explores original and personal experience, while never losing touch with the real world"

(Paul Francis, poet)



"This is a collection of shared secrets and conversational asides, a series of doors opening into colourful, magical worlds. In here, you’ll find council flats and kraken, laundry and skateboards, tea-leaf futures and dreams"
 
(Steve Pottinger, poet)
 

The gorgeous paintings on the cover of On the Wing and Earth Walker are by fabulous Wolverhampton artist Clare Wassermann.

When I'm not writing, I work as a translator from German and French (under the name Ros Mendy).

If you'd like to get in touch, you can send me an email

 


 

Popular posts from this blog

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 ( P)review of Earth Walker by Paul Francis : Earth Walker is the lone survivor from an alien planet, calmly reporting back on weird phenomena. Ros Woolner can create a myth from a casual remark, and this collection offers a range of surreal landscapes. Radiators in the Desert recounts a detailed fantasy, while also mocking its narrator’s confident self-delusion: “I know just what to do.” These poems provide a varied chorus of voices - gardener, truckdriver, walker, absent-minded aunt - and an impressive technical range which takes in pantoum and nursery rhyme, haibun and golden shovel, while also exploring a spectrum of freer forms. “Hey, Death” is a brilliant title, and her dialogue with the Pyro salesman is brilliantly inventive. Ros Woolner adopts a variety of tones, but is never obscure, pretentious or dull. She starts and ends with the two sonnets which came first and third in the Guernsey competition of 2021. They could have been written by different poets – a feminist fable a
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Pruning the laurel

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I'm very excited that one of my gardening poems won the 2021 Poems on the Move competition run by the Guernsey Literary Festival and judged by Kate Clanchy, who said:  "Best of all, I like the unexpected: I had never read a poem about feminism and hedge trimming before, and in the end, that supplied our winner." Pruning the laurel Three points of contact with the tree, the way my mother taught me: two feet, one hand, one free to hold the saw. A smell of bay leaves now, pale sawdust on my clothes like flour, the thump as each branch hits the ground. I’m high enough to see across five gardens: wheelbarrows and washing lines, a football goal, a Wendy house. My neighbour steps outside. Where’s hubby then? he asks, his meaning clear. Things must look different from down there. I guess I seem quite small to him, my saw no bigger than a bread knife. Not sure , I say, my eyes on what I’m doing ­– one hand on the saw, three points of contact – What did you want him fo
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The Unfinished Sonnet project

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'Little girl holding plasticine' Image by Nenad Stojkovic  ( CC licence 2.0 ) On Tuesday 10th October 2023, some of the 16 poets who have responded to my ' Unfinished Sonnet ' challenge will be reading their finished sonnets at City Voices in Wolverhampton. A reminder of the first two and a half lines: Unfinished Sonnet by Ros Woolner She thinks she’s firm. Says Sorry, not tonight . And he thinks Cool. She just needs softening up – like plasticine. A little squeeze… (from Earth Walker , Offa’s Press 2023) Come and hear some of the unexpected responses!  There are poems that rhyme and poems that don't, poems set in bedrooms, a restaurant, a hospital ward, a music room and a courtroom. Poems in which he gets his way and poems in which she gets hers, and some in which what the two of them want or don't want is not at all what you might expect! City Voices with David Fletcher, Ros Woolner’s ‘Unfinished Sonnets’, Kuli Kohli plus Jeff Phelps who’ll be
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