The Day Before Joy

"There's a jolting frankness to these poems. Sometimes oddly bare and powerful, they say what they mean."




- Mark Waldron







"Penny Sharman's poems have a painter's touch, not just in terms of colour, form and light as invocation but in the care with which she picks words and feels her way through them to offer magical experiences that feel fresh and precise."




- George Szirtes







"Penny Sharman believes in beauty. She believes in a world where "cabbage white flies low / over the singing river," "Dragon lines at Culbone," and a world where "we are canopy adrift, clouds of happy happy-happy." She's a poet who believes there's a "green door / oasis in a burnt out mind" of this century, this crisis where we all find ourselves. So, perhaps it is a blessing that there are still people like Penny Sharman, telling us that "magical plant / mistletoe / needs a / kiss" - maybe if more people thought that way, our world would be kinder.




- Ilya Kaminsky




"Penny Sharman writes with passion and intensity, painting the world in luminous colours.

For her, the meaning is somewhere within the microcosms that make up this universe - the snowflake,

the insect, the hair standing up on your skin. In many of her poems she celebrates the unexpected

pleasures of the ageing body, suggesting that the years bring, not exactly wisdom, but a shameless

curiosity that knows it can never be fully satisfied."




- Ailsa Cox