The Bruise Palette

With the grounded lyricism readers loved in The Comforter and A Forager's Life, Helen Lehndorf captures the beauties and burdens of entanglement with people and with place. The poems of The Bruise Palette move through the demands of care, complexities of community and raw radiance of deep nature connection.

Scenes of urban wilds, gritty community spaces and polluted city waters populate writing which asks more questions than it answers. Lehndorf explores how we are shaped and sometimes bruised by the people we love and the land we live on. This is poetry as sustenance: nourishing, nuanced and threaded with devotion.