ELIZABETH RAPP
Elizabeth Rapp lives in a small cottage in East Devon in the Blackdown Hills, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. She grew up in rural Worcestershire, which gave her love of the natural world and wildlife, the source of many themes in her poetry.
After three years at Westminster College Oxford, she taught in state school, then worked in residential communities for disturbed children from the East End of London. She has worked as a volunteer with the homeless; also in a childrens’ hospice for three years. She taught sculpture and English at a boys public school in Oxford before moving to Devon to write full time.
Her poems have been widely published in national magazines and anthologies. She won first prize in the Trewithen, Envoi and the AA Sanders competitions. She runs creative writing workshops, both residential and day groups and delights in helping people to discover what riches are tucked away inside their own life experience which can be expressed through writing. She is invited to give poetry readings of her own work at various venues in the country, she has published three collections of poetry, the latest being ‘Dancing on Bones’, published by the Rockingham Press and launched at Dartington Festival in 2000.
In
2005 she was licensed as a Lay Minister (or Reader) in the Church of England
to work in Exeter Prison and to lead creative writing workshops and retreats
in the Dioceses: all of which she hopes will prove to be fun, fulfilling
and energising for all who take part.
Reviews about Elizabeth's poems include the following:
“Those who admired Elizabeth Rapps volume Hare and Sixpence
will find in this collection the same remarkable sensibility, able to
empathize alike with the sufferings of animals and humans and to imagine
unusual physical experience.”
Anne Ridler
“Your poems have always seemed to me both thoughtful and dramatic,
eager to explore your own inner life even as they look outwards at different,
sometimes startling forms of life in the wild, the half-wild”
Brendan Kennelly
“Elizabeth
Rapps poems have great sensitivity, acuteness of perception. Most of all,
despite their great range, she has a unique and insistent voice.”
John Latham
To purchase books;
Rockingham
Press
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