Audrey Ardern-Jones
Time in Pleats and Folds
This collection makes space for the memories, dreams and different versions of time which have populated Audrey’s life. Spanning the family’s Polish/Ukrainian history, her childhood in Zambia and her nursing career, the poems account for life’s contradictory tragedies and its glories, and allows people she believes in to live on.
ISBN 978-1-912876-87-7
Paperback
62 pages
£10 +P&P
THE AUTHOR
Audrey Ardern-Jones is a widely published and award-winning poet. She has enjoyed a wonderful career as a nurse in many different roles and is the Artist in Residence at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust where she donates paintings and teaches art & poetry in the Children’s Unit. She co-runs online creative writing sessions for cancer patients at the Maggie’s Centre in Sutton and contributes to Epsom & Ewell poetry events.
"This collection serves as heritage and legacy, and as history both inherited and bestowed. In poems replete with generosity and wisdom, Ardern-Jones fulfils the role of historian and bard”
~ Claire Dyer
“Ardern-Jones’s poems step lightly across time and place, and there’s a vibrant love of poetry in her skilled use of form. Stories of patients encountered during her nursing career, lost or seemingly ordinary, are told with warm empathy.”
~ Alex Josephy
“Along with delicate nature poems she meditates on her ancestors, patients and family. This distinguished collection includes a witty description of life lived with multiple neighbours.”
~ Angela Kirby
Audrey Ardern-Jones
Doing the Rounds
This collection touches on the poet’s childhood memories of living in Africa – her feelings of being in awe of so much and yet uncertain about many of the happenings. Most of her travel poems in India relate to incidents that have made her question herself – some of the poems about her Polish mother and her suffering post-WW2 echo throughout the collection.
ISBN 978-1-912876-15-0
Paperback
64 pages
£9.99 +P&P
‘Doing the Rounds’ is Audrey’s debut collection.
"Ardern-Jones is a poet with an artist’s painterly sensibility, a musician’s fine ear, a nurse’s affinity for strangers and their plight. Poems for the ear, poems of language – Polish and Bemba, Portuguese and English. An intelligent, finely crafted poetry of curiosity and caring, of listening and loving, of humour and hope.”
Paul Stephenson
“These poems have an openness and generosity of spirit with a precise use of language that brings the reader into the world of what it is to be human. Ardern-Jones’s rich cultural heritage and work experiences are rooted in the living world. The book explores love and friendship across boundaries.”
Wendy French
“These are poems that take us round and through a life, illuminated by sharp-eyed observation, personal insight, and most of all a generous sense of our shared humanity.”
Robert Seatter
Audrey with Actress Helen George at Chelsea Flower Show 2021.