Published by Original Plus and includes 65 poems over 71 pages.
ISBN 0953359190.  Cover price £7

Click on the title to read the title poem: Yellow Torchlight and the Blues
Click here to link to publishers: Original Plus
Click here to order via Amazon (UK)

Comments:-

“The attractive-destructive glitter of the music business illuminates many of these poems.  There are narratives of the modern world – allusive, razor-edged and darkly perceptive.  The poet herself remains almost invisible.  Her voice (and it is a singing voice) echoes compellingly from the wings…” Helena Nelson author “Starlight on Water”, Winner of the Aldeburgh Jerwood Prize.

“Her cigarette-scarred voice
packs emotion into facile rhymes
as she sings
achingly
alone

It is with force and economy that Emma Lee writes.  For anyone who has sat or played in dim, back-room blues clubs or listened to great, but unknown, blues singers, the above quote from one of her poems cannot fail to impress.  Like much of her work, the poems in this collection are direct jabs of soul into the mediocrity of many lives lived between the desperation of the promotion ladder and car-polishing Sundays.”  Martin Holroyd, editor Poetry Monthly.

“Emma Lee creates a vivid and fascinating world in her poems; often one of city streets, where lonely people exist on the edge of life, menace pervades and appearance belies truth – barren landscapes in which to search for a soul.”  Cathy Grindrod, Literature Development Officer Nottingham City, previously editor of Poetry Nottingham International.

“Emma Lee’s poetry is vibrant and memorable, containing images that are often painterly in colour and texture.  Employing strong visual pictures such as blue eye shadow streaking into the corner of an eye, or a woman wearing a straight, black dress, many of Emma Lee’s poems stick in the mind’s eye long after the book has been closed.  The poet’s close eye for minute alterations in relationships, and in mood, means that many of the poems seem set in shifting emotional and physical landscapes.  In this, they bring to mind poems by Sylvia Plath, with their extraordinary subtlety of feeling and phrase.  I also appreciated the stream of humour running through the poems (such as a baby being named after a rival football team to her father’s after he fails to attend the birth).  Emma Lee’s poems are sharp, spare and economic, without missing out on the important details.  One of the most memorable poems in the collection is ‘ADA’, where Lord Byron’s legitimate daughter begins a puzzle later solved and used by computer buffs to create weapons programs.  Like many of her poems, ‘ADA’ is both thought provoking and visually memorable.  It also contains many ideas within a short amount of lines, and thus appears both stark and revealing.  In other words, this poem and others like it, make this a collection well worth buying and reading.”  Deborah Tyler-Bennett, editor The Coffee House.

“Interesting, complex, simple, whatever – these poems are not what they seem to be on an immediate reading.  Enigmatic, they represent the world we live in and aspects of it we may not be aware of.  Often they are cold and uncompromising; bringing to our notice the unalterable things and the always altering.  They are about the disaffected, the outsider; the abused; the sordid.  They are uncomfortable; the articulate the world of rejection, of cold detachment.  Often their starkness is disturbing.  There is total control over emotion and they carry no judgement but leave the reader to make up his own mind.  These are poems that do not ask you to come and enjoy them but, rather, to come prepared.”  Huw Watkins, poet.

Reviews:-

Emma Lee’s writing is highly evocative of the smoky, energy-charged ambiguous world of gigs – jazz, blues, rock – where vanity vies with raw talent, and characters yearn for intimacy, communication.  Many of these poems achieve that.  The title poem for instance where musicians appear as blind watchers/ sensing their way through songs, and to stand behind a mic is to don a performer’s mask that can convey real depths of anguish.  Often the singer’s psyche is a troubled one, and Lee explores this dimension too, particularly in her concluding sonnet sequence.

The creative artist as an exalted, troubled soul  is a conventially Romantic notion, and parallels are extended between poet and the mentally troubled and marginalised.  But there is down-to-earth inflection in all of Lee’s writing which prevents this collection becoming pretentious in any way.  The glimpses we catch of lives blighted by interior or exterior distress are presented apparently quite artlessly, often using fragments of quotation – “Known as Crow” almost lets the subject speak for himself; and one believes his words are taken from life.  There is a distinct skill at work here though: complex and contemporary forms, literary allusions (particularly to Plath) and an impressive sense of how to close a poem.  Occasionally I craved more musicality in her vocabulary and phrasing, but a certain rough edge in Lee’s language does complement to visceral locations she evokes.

Reviewer: Sarah Law in Orbis #133

YELLOW TORCHLIGHT AND THE BLUES is the new collection from Emma Lee, a Leicester based poet, who has been widely published, broadcast and a prize winner on a number of occasions.

This collection naturally divides into two halves. The second half focuses on the music business. The poems show a world populated by fading or never-quite-made-it popstars and women in stilettos and too much eye make-up. They offer an interesting insight into this often seedy world with its disappointments, drug use and mental health issues. Lee used to review bands and these poems are full of well-observed detail.

The first half of the book ranges over society’s outsiders, birth, death, family relations, abuse and football. Some of the poems are too matter of fact: for example we can read in the newspapers about the facts around redundancy and the poem HUMAN RESOURCES ADVISOR doesn’t add anything to our understanding of the issue, or to our empathy for people who have been made redundant. Some of the poems are disturbing, such as LITTLE WALL which tells the story of a child in his room, wondering what is going on in through the wall of his parent’s room and THE ROOM OF DOLLS:

 He enters his mother’s private room,
 redolent with magnolias.
 He sees a thousand staring eyes.

Many of the best poems are moving and memorable character studies, for example: MARK; ANDREW and SOME EMPTY SEATS ARE TAKEN with its portrait of a widower, unused to his wife’s absence, who, on getting off the bus:

 …pulls himself up and bites his lip
 as he leaves without looking
 at the empty seat he’d sat next to.

The most remarkable poem for me is USING FRENCH KNOTS FOR BLUEBELLS, which I quote in full below:

 Complete all the two-strand stitches:
 satin leaves, stems: ready for flower buds

 Select the right shade of blue:
 the positive pregnancy test is a good guide.

 Pick a single strand, push needle through and hold,
 like that moment between test and result,

 wrap the thread around the needle at least three times.
 A little knot of cells had latched to a womb’s lining.

 Ease the needle back through the cloth:
 the knot should fix.

 If not, the advice is to forget and try again
 — think of it as a dropped stitch.

 Embroidery keeps the hands busy.

This poem conveys loss beautifully — the activity that occupies the hands but reminds the parallels between the sewing and the failed pregnancy and the prevalence of the colour blue throughout.

The collection gives glimpses into parts of life where many of us would prefer not to go and poets are not encouraged these days to lead us there. It is not always an easy journey, and some of the poems work better than others, but it is reassuring to find someone with undeniable talent writing about these topics.

Reviewer: Juliet Wilson, review published at New Hope International Review On-line.

I bought this collection on the strength of having heard the author read. I was struck by the apparent straightforwardness of the work when I heard it. And that impression is strongly reinforced on reading. The trick is, it seems, to write poems that seem so very straightforward but still manage to pack the punch of Emma Lee’s work. I still can’t work out quite how she does it. Poems like “Julie” and “The Linden Hotel” are good examples of this. Having said all the above, the one that I enjoyed the most was “Miranda’s Warning” – a playfully funny poem that rang very true for me.

Review from Amazon