Chris Dickinson

Flying a Curve

AVAILABLE 7TH SEPTEMBER 2026!! Get your copy here.

Or contact us if you would prefer a copy signed by the author herself. Email poeticedgepublishers@gmail.com. Please note, direct orders will include p&p.

“Chris Dickinson’s debut collection, Flying a Curve, is a unique scrapbook of a poet’s life; one that will echo in your soul long after you finish reading. A poignant story of life, love and loss, embracing the importance of reflection and remembrance. This is a tender, emotive collection within which we will all find resonance. From family, relationships, nature, to the humour and glorious mundanity of daily life that juxtaposes the reality of war and mortality, it is a love song of happiness, sorrow and humanity.”

The ONLINE LAUNCH will take place on 26th Sept 2026. Chris Dickinson will feature alongside special guests CATHY CARSON and LYDIA HARRIS, with experienced poet CHLOË JACQUET hosting the event alongside our editor-in-chief ASHLEY EDGE

You can get a ticket here

Bio:

Chris Dickinson, retired teacher of English, grandmother, and proud member of the International women’s poetry group Tesoro, created by Stacy Ardis Dyson, has lived with her husband, raising a family and a house full of cats in Lincolnshire UK, for most of her working life. She always loved stories and discovered the power of poetry after finding Christina Rossetti’s lines in a dog-eared volume of her mother’s when she was thirteen:

‘Remember me when I am gone away

Gone away into the silent land’

For years she wrote secretively but was inspired to develop her craft in the workshops held by NATE (The National Association for Teachers of English) in the 1990s. Chris has been sharing her words with Spalding’s Red Wine Writers and the local folk club for many years. Zoom has taken her further afield and opened up the worldwide network of poets who have been a revelation and a constant source of learning and encouragement. She has been active on the open mic scene, evoking the day-to-day details that throw light on human experience.

Chris Dickinson’s poetry was first published in Spokes literary magazine 1993 and most recently in The North. She has contributed to anthologies produced by Tesoro, Poetic Edge and Fin Hall, most notably with over 70 other poets over 70 years old in Fin’s ‘I Ache in Places I used to Play’. This collection came together gradually and is an attempt to understand the complexities of our relationships and to draw comfort from the patterns in our lives.

Praise for Flying a Curve

In this poignant, nostalgic, narrative collection, Chris Dickinson gives us an intimate window on a life. Evocative, visceral and meticulous in observation, these poems explore an evolution from childhood to grandparent and all in between. Love and loss in every form is laid bare as she interrogates family, relationships, war, faith, mortality and the things that make us human. Through graceful and lyrical use of language, we bear witness to moments that are illustrated with such poignancy and tenderness, it is impossible to look away.

At times reflective and pastoral, this triumphant legacy of poems inspires us all to look closer and love deeper.

Cathy Carson, Author of Becoming Marvellous (Flight of the Dragonfly Press, 2025)

Sometimes love is about remembering. Sometimes it’s about courage. Sometimes, it’s about saving/making memories for people you don’t know or may never meet.

Chris Dickinson’s Flying a Curve covers all three. Long ago reminiscence, present/pleasant musings, stories for folks you’ve only heard storied or may never hear of at all. Clear and simple songs saying “I was here. We remember. We’re here. We remember”.

Deft, silken, elegant threads woven through with clear thought and reality. What Chris makes us relive is the truth that real love is never all puff-clouds and rainbows. It is pain, laughter, hard work, movements and moments that live forever etched into our DNA. Rarely does one find that writer who can craft comfort, make ordinary circumstance sing, draw pure joy out of simplicity. She is a true wordspinner – testing, tempering, making fine each word, each sentence, every strand of the love song she’s creating.

Every poem in this collection is simply that. A love song. Tended to, clearly seen, offered in its best form. Pure beauty – nothing more. Nothing less.

That is not talent. It is genius.

And that crafted, careful genius? It is what Chris Dickinson does better than anybody I know.

Stacy Ardis Dyson, Creator/Lead Poet for Tesoro; Author of Lovely And Suffering, Follow Me On This and Because The Sun Would Not Move

These poems entice you into a life lived forwards and backwards. They invite you to the careful placing of words as they resolve themselves into sonnets, blank verse, the villanelle. They draw you into the pains and joys of lives lived and reflected on. These are poems of encounters with parents, grandchildren, friends, cats, dogs. Poems in which the sweeps of history are acknowledged and contained. These are poems of change, of growing, of ageing. You will be invited into a doll’s house, a home where a child is lost.

These are stories that need to be told.

The poems are capacious. They move from year nine English to a parent’s death, from Arctic traveller to yoga. They assert a love of life, harnessing poetry’s power to express this vitality. In ‘Cropping the Verse’ Dickinson lays out her poetic creed. Let the words flow. Life and language are one and the same. She writes, a turn of phrase in the air, a cut to the heart. The reader is cut to the heart by the extraordinary ‘Caring Work’, a poem that speaks from helplessness and vulnerability, transformed into strength and deep humanity.

This collection is more than a life story. The births and deaths are here but the poems explore the patterns and threads of our universes, always returning to the human, always aware of the great Earth’s voice.

Lydia Harris, Author of Objects for Private Devotion (Pindrop, 2022) and Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World (Blue Diode, 2024)

If you’re looking for a book of poems full of gentleness about what are, in the end, the most important human issues, you might just have found it. Chris Dickinson writes beautifully of life, home and family.

There are delicate reminiscences of childhood, parents and siblings, of the deep and steady value of grandparents, and all in lines written with an extraordinary sensibility. At times the words are so exquisite as to almost make one wince with self-recognition.

The poems depend not so much on rhyme, or even rhythm – although both are there – as on seemingly effortless phrasing, which carries them along. This is a collection to go back to, because it speaks quietly and convincingly about the things that really matter to decent people, those who want to find value and contentment in how they live their lives.

Philip Dunkerley, Peterborough ‘Good Shout Slam Champion’ 2025; Author of Blades of Grass, Schrödinger’s Eco-Cat and As Red as Rubies