Description
A Point of Love gathers poems written over four decades, alongside a career as an artist and art teacher. In this collection, Hedley-Dent combines a painter’s gaze with a deep appreciation of place. His poems explore life’s mysteries and materials with delicacy, wit and empathy, always delighting in truth.
“It’s fitting that this collection starts with ‘The Art of Seeing’ and ends with ‘Gifts’, because all the poems here feel like gentle lessons in compassion and open-heartedness. Whether we are being invited into a child’s isolation hospital, a Van Dyck painting, a perfect getaway in Paris or a trudge across morning fields, each poem slants the camera so we can find fresh views to admire and to surprise us. Chris Hedley-Dent is a generous and curious poet and A Point of Love – ‘a point of resistance… against the pitiless world’ – is a well-crafted book that quickly becomes the best kind of friend.”
Sarah Salway
“This is a beautiful collection of sensitively observed moments – the poet is an especially acute witness to family and friendships and their unspoken depths of connection. Such attention to the intimate can also surprise, as the artist in the poet cannily and sometimes devastatingly reveals world events in tiny gestures of detail. And, once in a while, there is a poem that is very very funny.”
Richard Price
