A Second Whisper, Paperback

A Second Whisper is a thoughtful and sensitive collection that reflects the changing identities of a woman: in motherhood, in widowhood, in friendship and grief. There are elegies to the loss in 2014 of her mentor and partner, the poet Dannie Abse which are a tribute to their deep friendship. There are also poems to her late husband who died in 2006 and for their children and for relationships from the author's past in New York City and Denmark. The poems are both elegiac and celebratory: they move and change tone as the author travels to the past and negotiates through the geography of grief and feelings of displacement in London, and finally opens to her new life in the present.

Lynne Hjelmgaard has three published poetry collections: Manhattan Sonnets (Redbeck Press 2003), The Ring (Shearsman 2011) and A Boat Called Annalise (Seren 2016.) Versions of poems from A Second Whisper have appeared in magazines and anthologies, most recently in the summer issue of Poetry Wales, 2018. She is presently working on a sequence of responses to the poems of Dannie Abse.