Based in rural East Sussex, Kay Syrad has published four solo poetry collections and two novels, as well as many collaborative works. She was Poetry Editor of the longstanding journal Envoi from 2014‑2020 and writes essays and reviews for a range of publications. Her latest collection is yellow noon-day (2025), which follows what is near (2021) and Inland (2018) (all Cinnamon Press). Her first collection, Double Edge, was published in 2012 by Pighog Press. Kay has written a libretto for a choral work with jazz musician Trevor Watts, and created an art-text work, Exchange, with environmental artist Chris Drury (published by Little Toller/Cape Farewell, 2015). Her limited edition book, work of the lightship men: 1000 tasks (2014) was purchased by the National Maritime Museum for their permanent collection.
 
Since 2018, with Clare Whistler, Kay has been half of the composite eco-poet kin’d & kin’d, making work together and co-devising a series of eco-poetics courses for a range of venues including ONCA Gallery in Brighton, Knepp Wildland in West Sussex, the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, the RSA London and Wakehurst Kew. She and Clare have also edited several anthologies of eco-poetry written by participants on their courses and an eco-poetry source book, Wild Correspondings (Elephant Press, 2021). In 2024 they created a Cloak for Courage, the process of which is described in their book The evolution of a thought about courage in the Anthropocene (Elephant Press) and here.
 
About yellow noon-day:
 

Tender and often deeply personal meditations on our human place in the fragile web of life, these poems embody an immersive attentiveness to that relationship in all its complex shades of love, concern and shame.

 

what is near:
 

a delicate yet impassioned fusion of elegy, activism and wonder.

 

Inland:
 

truly special collection … the “live words” convey a mystical state of both being and witnessing.

 

Double Edge:
 

a sophisticated and accomplished first collection where knowledge is never merely knowing but lit with unexpected insights and human sympathy.

 

In a Poetry London review of earlier work, Carol Rumens described Kay as ‘sensitive to the textures of language […] wittily sensuous [… and] something of a formalist […]’.