Bruise Palette

Description

ISBN: 9780473787851
Title: Bruise Palette
Author: LEHNDORF HELEN

With the grounded lyricism readers loved in The Comforter and A Forager’s Life,
Helen Lehndorf captures the beauties and burdens of entanglement with people and with place.

The poems of The Bruise Palette move through the demands of care, complexities of community and raw radiance of deep nature connection.

Scenes of urban wilds, gritty community spaces and polluted city waters populate writing which asks more questions than it answers. Lehndorf explores how we are shaped and sometimes bruised by the people we love and the land we live on.

This is poetry as sustenance: nourishing, nuanced and threaded with devotion.

‘The Bruise Palette is an attentive stroll through creaking artist spaces, cluttered homes, convolvulus-entangled gardens and urban edgelands. The tensions in this collection are clearer than the waters which run through many of its poems; an impressive juggling act. Delicate craft captures optimistic beauty whilst navigating the heaviness of close observation through many ‘concreted-over’ ironies.’

– Celina Goacher


‘In the everyday noticing, Helen Lehndorf’s writing travels through the many shades and textures of a Bruise Palette. Reflecting on the ironies and uncertainty of life, this collection offers a ‘sunny shimmer’ on the wall of a ‘shady-lane’ all the while ‘aware of the futility of attempts to contain what stings’.

– Paula Clare King

Format: Paperback
Publication date: 29/05/2026
Pages: 82
Available stock: 43