Flambard Press: Jack's Letters Home by Cynthia Fuller

No Man’s Land Dear Mother and Dad, this is the first chance I’ve had to write as we’ve been on the move, It fell down with rain most of the way here, The wind was something cruel, and mud over our boots all the way, over our puttees where we slipped in shell holes – it was that dark. We did look a picture – tell Harry. We had to stand in our wet clothes all day until they dried on us, socks and all.

Jack’s Letters Home, 1917–18 tells the story of Cynthia Fuller’s uncle who was killed aged 19 on the Western Front during the First World War. The poems are based on real letters written by Jack to his family between February 1917 and April 1918, but not discovered by the poet until 2000. They tell of his transformation from shop assistant to soldier and the harshness of conditions during training, and show his determined cheerfulness and his pleasure in the regular letters and parcels of home cooking he received from home.

This sequence of poems also enters the inevitable silences, voicing his mother’s constant anxiety and telling of the intensity of her relationship with Jack, her elder son. His body was never found, but his name appears on a war memorial in France. This collection is another memorial to him and all the other young men who did not come back.

Jack's Letters Home is a Poetry Book Society recommendation.

'It is a fantastic project, brave to write and hard to read, making real poetry out of plain language and everyday speech. The gap between what is said and what is not said is terribly moving.' Andy Croft
'The collection is wonderfully accepting of ordinariness; and an ordinariness so familiar, so known.' Gillian Allnutt
'This is a timely exercise movingly written and presented. The movement is from banality and ordinary decency to the horrors of the front and finally to the almost anticlimactic tragedy at the end, the body never found. The known soldier. This was the meat course and deeply affected all those there.' John Wilson's review of Cynthia Fuller at the Buxton Festival Fringe 2007

To buy this book:

Jack's Letters Home costs £7.00 and was published in November 2006.
ISBN: 978-1-873226-85-8

Cynthia Fuller was born in Kent, but has lived in the North East since the 1970s, working freelance as a teacher of literature and creative writing in Adult and Higher Education, and also with groups in the community. She has two grown-up sons.

She has co-edited several poetry anthologies, including Smelter (Mudfog, 2003) with Kevin Cadwallender, The Poetry Cure (Bloodaxe, 2005) with Julia Darling, and North By North East (Iron Press, 2006) with Andy Croft. Her poetry has appeared in such anthologies as Bloodaxe’s New Women Poets and Being Alive.

Her earlier collections were Moving Towards Light (1992), Instructions for the Desert (1996) and Only a Small Boat (2001). Jack's Letters Home, her previous collection, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2006. Her latest is Background Music. All have been published by Flambard Press.

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