Publications

the hispering (Black Sunflowers, 2021) dissembles and reassembles how the world speaks to us and what happens if we listen. It contains meadows, oceans, fairytales and the whisper of unseen creatures. A sequence of prose-poem-like glimpses slip between dream, waking and storytelling; plant and human ecologies; the pervasiveness of water; and how being-birthed and birthing are seeded in every word writeen and read.
Written in the intensity of the April 2020 lockdown in England, it feels as strange as those times, perhaps more hopeful. Read more about its creation on EchoSoundings, or a review of it by Carla Scarano on the Friday Poem. If you’re really curious, you can buy a copy her direct from Black Sunflowers

Cover painting: Winter Sea III by Joan Eardley

melt is an oceanic song of love, of hope, of belonging and longing. It begins in the north west of England, on the shores of Morecambe Bay, and ends in a future that may or may not have been foreseen in the Arctic.

Interspersed with images, tickertape on plastic updates, prose, poems and fragments, the book is an assemblage of joy and despair, of bodies, human and morethan. More ripples surrounding the book can be felt here

£12 (+p&p) Buy direct from me and get a origami whale slipped within the pages. Published by Waterloo Press. Shortlisted for the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Judges Sandeep Parmar and Naomi Shihab Nye called it ‘[a]
triumph of imagery interweave, human and sea, these moving poems employ lush, melodious language, rhythmic pacing, a hypnotic sense of attentive presence. Who are we after all, as we acknowledge the push and pull of waves, the mysteries present within every body of water? ‘

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Blurbs

melt is a book that demands our attention, slipping as it does, curiously and carefully, between enfolded worlds of intellect and feeling, giving us unique access to an archaeology of perception. As Hymas brings pressure to dailyness and the ordinary, she reminds us of the importance of locating ourselves in an increasingly precarious environment. This is a wise book that asks us to read slowly; a must read for these uncertain times.   Deryn Rees-Jones

In poems of precise observation and restless energy, Hymas shows us world and self as intertidal zones of flux and exchange, ‘ebb-dragged / and flood-ripped open’. There is mourning here, in the face of loss and ecological damage; there is questioning, an interrogation of our human ways of being in the world. But there is also hope, and above all a boundless sense of curiosity, yet without any demand for final knowledge: ‘I want to ask /more questions / I cannot answer’. melt is the work of a poet deeply engaged with the world, always open to ‘what will become’.   Helen Tookey

Sarah Hymas does not ignore that which we do not want to have to comprehend about our ocean, but nor does she preach at us. The restrained prose passages situate the work in the local as place of learning; the lyric sea poems explore extending what is possible for the human body within the more-than-human world. melforms part of the necessary and exciting work emerging today from new understandings of the bodies of water that surround the landmasses we inhabit.     Harriet Tarlo

a flotilla of golden plankton, one of which could be yours #everysecondbreath

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Host (Waterloo, 2010)

poetry

“The voices, the stories, the detail and the imagery are powerful, superbly-crafted and original.” Bernardine Evaristo

“The poetry is earthy and takes a no-nonsense approach to setting out their journey from community-based god-fearing and pious, through to the complexity, toughness and verging on faithlessness, of modernity.” Anne Stewart in Artemis

“… excellent at capturing social and religious codes of behaviour, with the acuity of Austen or Alice Munro … Host is a tactile and muscular collection, rooted in the complexities and textures of the physical world. Hymas has created fresh and exuberant work that, at its best, captures the awe of being alive.” Sarah Westcott

Waterloo Press have a few copies left… I think

If you live locally to me and would rather not pay postage costs please get in touch, I’m sure we can arrange something