Carole Coates began her career as a lecturer in English Literature and started writing poetry in middle age. Her first collection The Goodbye Edition was published by Shoestring Press in 2005.
 

It’s robust words from the land of the healthy living about things that fascinate all of us, that none of us can understand. This unsteady ground lies under all her poetry…

 

Envoi

 
 

Carole’s second collection Looking Good was published in 2009, by Shoestring Press. This book examines the experience of anorexia at a time when the condition was not diagnosed or discussed.

 

I like the ease of the historical references, the sense of learning lightly worn, naturalised in fact to the poetic texture. The poems are free of self-pity and have vitality and energy though dealing with the loss of both.

 

Carol Rumens

 
 

Carole s third collection Swallowing Stones was published in June 2012 by Shoestring Press. It’s a narrative poem and describes an imaginary country and culture through the voices of its inhabitants.
 

I have never read anything like it. It is an outstanding combination of imagination and intellect.

 

Neil Curry

 
 

Carole Coates is a fine poet with a novelist’s eye. In Swallowing Stones she creates an utterly compelling world and peoples it with vivid characters whose voices – sometimes shocking, sometimes lyrical, always perfectly judged – are woven together in this powerful and moving sequence.

 

Elizabeth Burns

 
 

I found it enormously impressive – as rich and inhabitable as a full-length novel. It made me think of Pound’’s remark that poetry should be as well-written as prose. I never for an instant had that slightly dutiful or worthy sense one often has while reading an extended poem – though it was rich poetically it was a real page-turner too … and so well-realised, both geographically and dramatically. I thought it an immense creative and technical achievement to simultaneously render those varied voices so convincingly while also evoking the landscape and culture which enveloped them.

 

Richard Francis

 
 

She has been widely published in the literary press and has also published critical writings. She is an experienced performer, offering a lively selection of her work. She is a member of the performance group Sixfold. She helps to organise April Poets, a series of poetry readings in Lancaster. Originally a Londoner, she now lives in Lancaster where she is a member of a writing group, SixPoets.