'Paul Hetherington has become a master of the prose poem form, creating intriguing yet hospitable pieces whose tonal, emotional and imaginative range are a delight. Each piece has been carefully wrought to become sharp and revelatory; his graceful cadences reach right into the heart of his subjects. This poet gives us substance, communion and an intense dialogue with the inner life. This is a superb collection.
'In Paul Hetherington’s Moonlight on Oleander things, places and human relationships become densely present in the process of being thought forward into ghostliness, through long and loving habit. Sequential without being narrative, consequential without the clincher of rhyme, Hetherington’s forms of words, gathered into blocks, seem like a new, telling version of sparseness, ‘unworded by exertion’ in the great tenderness the poet hints at, but will not overstate; in the links made between old worlds and new.
'Paul Hetherington’s ‘shrine to the fragment’ is more than the sum of its parts. Here, details and incidents are seen anew, obliquely, renewed with precise words and a clarity of language and vision. This book is, indeed ‘a beauty that sits in the hand’, these poems composed ‘as if memory [was] a slow-burning furnace’.
—Rupert Loydell ' (Publication summary)
'I am really honoured to be launching Paul Hetherington’s book of prose poetry, Moonlight on Oleander in this beautiful venue – it’s a bibliophile’s dream!
'I should say at the outset, I am prose poet and a prose poetry devotee, and this book is extraordinary because it pushes the prose poem to its limit – there’s nothing timid about Paul’s use of the prose poem form. He draws on its flexibility to create new and exciting varieties and approaches – from narrative prose poems with long, looping sentences (almost like long reels of film), to stark elegies which are taut and compressed in their lamentation, and sleek prose poetry sequences that grow with a kind of slow gestation to become something bigger than the sum of their parts.' (Introduction)
'I am really honoured to be launching Paul Hetherington’s book of prose poetry, Moonlight on Oleander in this beautiful venue – it’s a bibliophile’s dream!
'I should say at the outset, I am prose poet and a prose poetry devotee, and this book is extraordinary because it pushes the prose poem to its limit – there’s nothing timid about Paul’s use of the prose poem form. He draws on its flexibility to create new and exciting varieties and approaches – from narrative prose poems with long, looping sentences (almost like long reels of film), to stark elegies which are taut and compressed in their lamentation, and sleek prose poetry sequences that grow with a kind of slow gestation to become something bigger than the sum of their parts.' (Introduction)
