Between the Line and the Image: Launch, Blurb & Early Praise

Swapping his lens for a pencil, Adam Crump illustrates fantastical and beautiful images to sit alongside my monostich poetry in Lone Lines & Quiet Echoes. Some of his artwork appears beside selected poems but the images don’t explain the lines. They shift them. Evolve them. Sometimes adding humour, sometimes unease.

Like my previous collections, the book remains rooted in my signature themes and thought-provoking style and inviting the reader to become a co-creator in the journey. If you’d like to hear more — without me giving too much away! — join me on Monday 27th April, 5pm at Wrexham Library for my book launch, part of the week-long Wrexham Carnival of Words festival. I’d love to see you there! I’ll be in conversation with Natasha Borton and Adam Crump (AC Creative) about how his striking, Tim Burton–inspired aesthetic — blended with a touch of Quentin Blake’s energy complements and challenges my single-line poems. I’ll also be reading excerpts from the new collection and sharing the story behind how this book came to be.

Speaking of excerpts, here’s a sneak preview of the blurb — along with some early praise:

What if one line of poetry could open a world of imagination?

Lone Lines & Quiet Echoes is both a return and a reinvention for long-time followers, and a compelling introduction for new readers to a poet whose words linger and resonate. Preserving the lyrical voice Paul’s readers have come to love, these monostich poems are brief, powerful, and endlessly open to interpretation. Each line becomes an ambiguous poetic canvas, inviting you to pause, reflect, and discover your own meaning. Both fresh and familiar, this collection is an interactive journey-where the poet begins the thought, and you complete it.

"This collection is a beautiful exploration of image and space in poetry, inviting the reader to stop, and fully inhabit a single moment. Paul is inviting the reader to bring their own context, their own lived experience, to each sentence, meaning that every reader ultimately constructs their own understanding of this body of work.

These poems capture a single moment just before it turns, just before it slips away and is lost forever. Sometimes capturing love, and loss, other times humour and pop culture. It is a reminder that moments are entire stories if you give them the space to linger.

This is a book that can be opened at any page, on any day, sit with a single line for hours, consume the entire collection in one quiet moment, or return to it repeatedly as a source of prompts, reflection, and inspiration. Surreal at times, precise at others, these poems demonstrate how a pause, a word or a single thought can change the direction of how we see the everyday."

-Natasha Borton

I hope to see you at the celebratory book launch event and remember to stay tuned and follow my socials to keep updated and for new musings.

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