Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award winner 2023
Heather Cook’s first collection, Out of the Ordinary, won her the Frosted Fire First Pamphlet Award in 2023, and her award includes publication of this book and 50 free copies.
Out of the Ordinary was launched on 2 December and pre-launch copies can be ordered post-free within the United Kingdom until 5 December at 11:59 pm, with half postage for addresses in other countries.
A signed copy of Out Of The Ordinary is available direct from Hilary via this form.
Heather read from her book in a launch party event on Zoom, 2 December. Poets supporting her included fellow award winner Clare Starling and an open mic of 12 poets.
Heather has been placed or shortlisted in various competitions including Buxton, Ware, Wildfire Words, Writing Magazine, Shepton Mallet Snowdrop Festival and Hysteria.
Recently retired, Heather relishes having more time both to read and to write poetry. She is an active member of Woking Writers Circle and Woking Write-Out-Loud open mic events. Heather lives in Surrey in a very ordinary house surrounded by the most extraordinary and magical woods.
Endorsements of Out of the Ordinary
Warmth and humanity permeate these assured and crafted poems by Heather Cook. She writes about age with honesty, compassion, and gentle humour; about the badgers and the bees with appreciation and enjoyment.
But these poems also take unexpected turnings, a road less travelled: a Travelodge awash with raspberry teabags; an occasional encounter with prisoners; regret for a severed friendship; a long-distance affair seen through a rear-view mirror; an ageing mother and father glimpsed in momentary companionship.
In short, Heather Cook is a real find. Her poems offer comfort without sentimentality, plus wisdom and truth.
Greg Freeman, Write Out Loud
Seemingly simple prose but the words, the feelings and the meaning of each poem resonate. It takes true talent to make it look easy. These poems could be snapshots of anyone’s life and there is something for everyone to relate to. The scenes painted by the poet stir your own personal memories, to reminisce how you too felt that way.
Pensive, deep, witty, evocative… Heather has a natural gift for the right words at the right time. Just like the last line of “Loading the Dishwasher”. Read on, and by the end you’ll be hoping there’s another Heather Cook anthology planned.
Francesca Watson, Editor of Cats Protection official journal, The Cat
The title ‘Out of the Ordinary’ perfectly encapsulates both the apparently ordinary themes and the extraordinary quality of the writing. Heather’s warm wit bathes the mundane in a dashing cloak of quirkiness.
Sharron Green
A tender but unflinching appraisal of relationships which, to an outsider might seem pale, ordinary, but are actually complex. Heather’s dexterity with words offers us a privileged insight into a slew of underlying emotions, the careful delineation of the roles of the carer and the cared-for; and discovers humour in unexpected places.
Marilyn Timms
The title of Heather Cook’s collection has a deliberate ambivalence. It implies both that the poems spring from the ordinary – the quotidian – and that they transcend it. And indeed the collection provides evidence for both of these. In the final poem, ‘Grayson Perry’, Heather Cook takes comfort from the artist’s assurance that ‘it’s OK’ to ‘celebrate the ordinary’, and concludes:
Long may ordinary things be with us
to keep us sane in troubled times.
Elsewhere there are poems in which the poet encounters events or emotions which stray well away from the ‘ordinary’. At times she surprises with a change of scene as in ‘Carols at the prison’ and ‘Bread roses’; and there are occasional flashbacks to early memories.
In ‘Jamais vu’ she declares that:
more than once I’ve stumbled on another life
lived by someone who was almost me.
Whether ‘ordinary’ or not, throughout she is palpably honest. Poetry often involves varieties of self-portrayal, and honest personal reflection is one of the strengths of this impressive first collection.
David Morphet
Each poem in this collection is a reminder that the unexamined life is not worth living, as emphasised by Grayson Perry: ‘It is okay to celebrate the ordinary’. Each of these beautifully rendered glimpses of an ordinary examined life speak to a me I already know but have somehow forgotten; and in that knowing they remind me to be present in this moment, for as Heather says, ‘Behind me yesterday still festers unresolved. Tomorrow is an act of faith’.
Linda Parkinson-Hardman
Sample poems from Out of the Ordinary
Summer storm
I watch him picking strawberries
oblivious to summer trickling down his chin.
He checks the tautness of the twine,
fingers beans as bright as fresh-sloughed snakes,
stakes up fat unlikely blooms
with a patience maddening to see.
I know he’s smiling as he sees the apples form
and rests his earthy hand upon the trunk
as if to reassure a much-loved friend..
I realise the trunks of trees are green and grey
and idly wonder who else knows.
While we sleep in double-glazed denial,
a rogue storm sucks the ocean dry,
flings it screaming at soft summer plumpness,
trapping the lawn beneath a tracery of twigs.
At dawn we peer together through the glass,
latticed overnight by glistening pathways;
I see him later in his rough old coat,
holding a severed rose against its stem
as if by caring he might make good the loss.
Deep clean
His daughter organised it; cleared the clutter,
smuggled boxes to the hospice shop.
She left him standing in an almost empty room,
the dog pressed tight against his leg.
Two women came, bright and bracing,
filling the tired house with frightening smells.
Their energy shed spider blood,
scuttled woodlice into nothingness,
sucked powdered corpses out of corners.
The carpet writhed, unused to unimpeded light.
Only the windows twinkled with unreasoning joy.
The walls seem colder now, the sofa harder;
the dog more worried, whimpering in his sleep.
The man seems smaller, slightly lost,
as if he wished they could have changed the future
and left him with the comfort of the past.
Apples in a wheelbarrow
There was a time in late September
when softness veiled the apple trees
and blessed my mother’s face.
My father, wobbling on a ladder,
caressed each sun-flecked fruit
and touched her hand in passing it
through tangled leaves.
Locked in russet self-sufficiency,
they needed no-one else.
I should have been more pleased
to see them at their ease,
and proud of that shared harvest
glowing in the rusty barrow;
to see my father almost boyish,
my mother laughing at the twig
that snatched her headscarf;
but I shivered in the shadows,
too used to their unhappiness
to trust this fleeting glimpse of joy.
Order form for a post-free copy of Out of the Ordinary from Frosted Fire
This post-free offer is available until after the online launch on 2 December.
Heather will sign a copy of your book and post to you, if you order with this form