Dead letters

‘In Dead Letters, Carole Coates goes beyond elegy to communicate in poetry with her dead husband. The past they shared is reclaimed and celebrated, particularly through their mutual love of words – “both to see and say the hugger-mugger, muddy/ shining world, the shit and silver of it… Such magic luck.” But Coates is philosopher as much as poet, building her letters to the dead into a subtle meditation on body and soul. This is a quietly heroic project where death, gracefully, is not permitted the last word’. – Carol Ann Duffy

Carole Coates has published five full collections and a pamphlet with Shoestring Press and another pamphlet with Wayleave Press. A late starter in poetry, she is particularly noted for her ability to blend narrative and lyric. She lives in Lancaster which she says is a good place for poets.

Roger Elkin has said of her last collection, When the Swimming Pool Fell in the Sea (2021), ‘… this is a big and important book. Such is the close focus and detailed responses to events that the 39 poems transcend the personal to become a moving testament to love and survival.’ (The High Window). Carol Ann Duffy remarks ‘In this totally absorbing and moving collection, Carole Coates uses language as both reincarnation and elegy in a visceral exploration of illness, bereavement and widowhood’.