WAITING FOR TRUMPETS
Poems by Daphne Rock

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Daphne Rock has been a life-long writer, but took writing seriously and felt able to call herself a poet only after attending an Arvon Foundation course in 1981. Her previous life involved bringing up a family and working with teenagers in trouble. Her first published poems appeared in The Raving Beauties’ second collection, No Holds Barred (1982). She was a Lancaster Poetry Competition prizewinner in 1988 and a runner-up in the BBC Wildlife Poem of the Year Competition 1992. Her short stories have been published by Iron Press and by Aurora / Metro, and in magazines such as Bound Spiral and New Fiction. She was a prizewinner in the 1997 London Short Story Competition. Daphne Rock has also written several plays, including Four Women in a Mirror, which was produced by Islington Community Arts at Rosemary Branch and Courtyard theatres.

Waiting for Trumpets is a long-awaited first full collection.

“A sharply observant poet with Thomas Hardy’s eye for the ironies of life.”
Second Light Newsletter

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Ducks on the A44

It was a pattern
written on dirt under roads,
the way to water.
She was a duchess
disdaining cars,
neither to right nor left she looked,
leading her ducklings.
Neither to right nor left:
she stepped down the kerb. They followed.
This was an ancient way, a map
in their down heads.
Trucks swerved, brakes bit
as she crossed the A44:
trumpets might have sounded,
cloaks been flung in the mire.
The Red Sea rolled and retreated:
she passed, neck stiff, not knowing
how singly miracles come.

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WAITING FOR TRUMPETS
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: The Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague. Photograph: Mark Rock
Publication: SPRING 1998 (56 pages laminated paperback)