What Grandma Said

What Grandma Said is the winner of the inaugural Pocket Pamphlet Award and was launched at STANZA 2022 in the J G Innes bookshop, St Andrews.

Copies of the limited first edition of 100 copies are currently available.

'The Corona of sonnets was first dreamed up – officially, anyway – by the Siena Academy. John Donne used the form to illustrate the circularity of existence and our connection with a creator, later expressed – in poetry – in Eliot's ‘in my end is my beginning’. Your basic Corona is seven sonnets long: I’ll say ‘only’ seven sonnets long, because a step up from this is what’s known as a Heroic Corona - a fifteen-sonnet marathon in which each sonnet starts with the last line of the previous sonnet until the game is completed with a supersonnet made up of all the repeated lines in order. I have gone a step further with a full sixteen sonnets so that the very last line is the first line of the entire cycle: I’m proposing a sonnet to a page.

I admit to having stretched the repeats for the modern ear, which cannot bear too much repetition, and, for any keen metre-maids out there, to having added a metric foot here or deleted one there in a bid to avoid feet of clay.'

ISBN 9781911132615