Collected Poems and Prose

"A life's work of steady, compassionate, precise observation animates these deceptively simple poems, rooted in their landscape and making a sense of home over and over again in each one. A virtuoso of stress and line endings, Elaine Randell has the ability to turn the events of each day into a kind of thought-music, while the sequences of prose narrative vignettes provide glimpses of the difficult lives of the sorts of troubled people with whom she has come into contact in her professional work, sometimes tragic, sometimes absurd, sometimes hopeless, sometimes almost comic. It's all about the truth of things." -Ian Patterson

"Francis Ponge suggested that meaning is embedded within the chorus of expression and in a poem for her friend Lee Harwood, Elaine Randell was to suggest that the 'hidden agendas' which we have inherited 'bring us back to how and where we are'. Her career in the interwoven complexities of social work and the timeless need for a compassionate understanding of human frailty has made her aware, as a poet, that words are not a movement of a section of time but moments in themselves. Her poems convey a precision upon which her focus sharpens until the next moment should appear. As she well knows, that's what poetry is!" -Ian Brinton