Journeys (Paperback)

Sylvia Hikins has been making poems since she was twelve. That, and other things. Having produced three children, she then went back to school to read her degree. This led to a career in lecturing and management in further and higher education and various other developments in health, broadcasting, writing, painting and politics. A winner of the Waterstone's Poetry Prize, Sylvia has appeared widely on the poetry circuits, including the Edinburgh Fringe and has broadcast on radio and television. Her poem, Journey to the Edge, written after driving a truck to former Yugoslavia with Women's Aid for Peace while the war still raged, was described by Melvyn Bragg as 'extra-ordinarily impressive'. For seven years presenter of First Friday on BBC Radio Merseyside, she then, jointly with Dave Ward, judged and edited the 800 line Liverpool Saga, sponsored by Phil Redmond and the Liverpool Echo in celebration of the 800th year of Liverpool's Charter. In this collection, Sylvia invites you to travel with her on some significant journeys - from Viking Wirral to Viking Iceland, to Cuba, Europe, North Africa, to India in quest of Empire, to Australia to come to terms with grief, and back home to Merseyside. For Sylvia, poetry is the stuff of life, as ragged and untidy as life itself, nothing to do with Ivory Towers but more closely aligned to the tales of the tribe narrated by our kinfolk around the time of the first millennium.