Carol Sheppard - Playright & Poet
MADE OF GLASS
ISBN: : 9781913195410
First poetry collection, published 23rd October 2025, by RED BALCONY PRESS (an imprint of Black Eyes)
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Carol Sheppard’s debut collection glitters with reflections on life, love and longing, but Nature is the ever-present backdrop in these imagistic poems. From the initial poem, ‘Who am I?’ we see how the poet has been formed by her natural environment: ‘I am the squall of sparrows in the hedgerows… I am the countryside…’ Carol’s ability to place us is masterly and her voice clear as she leads us into each poem with confidence. Birds swoop and fly throughout this collection; the sea is a recurrent theme as are fields and the wind. In the poem ‘Mistle Thrush’ she uses myth to perfection; ‘They say we are the harbingers of the storm.’ In other poems, her strong narrative style hints at Carol’s additional talent, playwriting; her characterisation is strong and the tenderness with which she portrays her loved ones, heartwarming. The reader is captured, drawn through this collection, delighted at each turn of subject and yet over all is the feeling that life and reality are fragile; as though Made of Glass.
Josephine Lay, Poet & Writer, author of ‘A Quietus’ & ‘Creating Stanley’ (novel)
“A deeply engaging collection of poems that take in a breathless range of people, places, emotions, events, history, myth, landscape and nature. Some read as last love letters to a disappearing countryside, others reflect on the minutiae of love, passion and the everyday domestic details of shared lives. A poetry collection that you will reread again and again.”
Dr Jason Griffiths, Senior research fellow University of Gloucestershire & co-director Reading the Forest
Carol Sheppard delivers a menagerie of stanzas made of glass; fragile and universal right from the leading epigraph, to the magnificent ‘Copious’, and across white paper skies of cynicism and humour. Songs, often ornithological, of aging and mortality, histories, nostalgia and longing, as in the William Carlos Williams’-inspired ‘Postcard’. Settle down with an insightful survey of people and places with this debut collection, a fitting first foray for Red Balcony Press. –
Karlostheunhappy, 2022-2023 International Beat Poet Laureate (England)
'These are colourful, relatable, keenly-observed poems by a talented writer. I particularly enjoyed the more descriptive and emotional poems from imagistic, painterly pieces on horizons with distant boats and turbines to a field with a lone animal skull that is a crown of its own body. The intriguing reflections on identity and musings on love make this an appealing collection for a wider audience.'
Matthew M C Smith, author of The Keeper of Aeons
In Made of Glass, Carol’s debut collection, we are given generous and personal poems about desire, longing, love, loss, revenge, the ways we might heal ‘the broken pieces.’ And we are given the countryside, so important to the poet. Not simply as a place of beauty – ‘green meadows and brown furrowed fields’ – but as a place where a sheep’s skull can be found ‘the rest of its body missing’. As readers we are shown how our encounters, with the sea, the river, the land, build our identities. Throughout there is a sense of time passing, of mortality, the complexities, challenges and fullness of lives. It’s a book about vulnerability, as in the poem, ‘Made of Glass.’ And transformation – ‘I am that little bird.’
Belinda Rimmer, Poet
Carol Sheppard
Carol Sheppard doesn’t know whether to write poetry or plays so writes both. Her poetry story began when she was 10 years old and wrote a 15-stanza poem on George and the Dragon while her classmates were struggling to write four lines.
She has been published in several poetry journals and anthologies and her poems have been exhibited in the Biggar Poetry Garden and Poetry Posts in Bream and Portland, Oregan.
She was thrilled to be Poet in Residence at the Gloucestershire Poetry Festival 2023. She is an active member of Gloucestershire Poetry Society and Dean Writers Circle.