Small Moon Curve by Roz Goddard is an intimate poetry memoir exploring what it means to ease open to the restorative powers of love, faith and beauty following diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. In this compelling, tender and deeply moving testimony, the narrator discovers a surprising and powerful affinity with Tess of the D’Urbervilles – as spiritual companion and guide through the challenging currents of illness, trauma and transformation.

This collection considers the stories we inherit, those we tell ourselves – and power of stories to rescue and renew us in a moment where “the world outside, the coming dawn, can only be reached by crossing a terrible sea”. From a Buddhist retreat, to the nighttime depths of a maternity suite and the dark waters of a South Wales reservoir, Goddard’s beautiful and sensitive poems study what it means to step into the wild river of ourselves – and feel alive. Here, poetry is way to hold and examine the things we are fearful of, and to find compassion and resolve in order to make peace with our past and live fully in our present.

"The poems of Small Moon Curve address grief, fear, illness, and loss, but turn into the force of those experiences as if to lift upon them like a wing, making them also – at one and the same time – poems of life and wonder. This transmutation is at the heart of a book in which language both tracks and enacts a form of recovery, searching the dream of consciousness, the translations of memory, and visceral feeling, ‘where truth is awake’." - Gregory Leadbetter

‘Roz Goddard is one of my favourite poets and Small Moon Curve shines with all that I admire in her poems: mystery, beauty, deep tenderness and a willingness to venture into the dark and light it with love.’ - Liz Berry

‘When it comes to coping with carcinogenic cells in our body, how can we tell it like it is? ‘Should we tell our secrets, Tess . . .’ asks the poet of Hardy’s fictional heroine. In this centred and sensitive collection, Roz Goddard certainly does tell secrets, with both tenderness and triumph, making them timeless, universal, and even useful, especially to anyone who’s been through it.’ - Matt Holland

Roz Goddard is a poet and teacher. Her latest poetry collection, Lost City, was published in 2020, by The Emma Press. Previous short collections have been published by Nine Arches Press and Flarestack Poets. She was a finalist for the Moth Poetry Prize in 2022 and works as a poetry mentor for The Poetry Society. She is currently training for ordination in the Triratna Buddhist Order. She is a former poet laureate of Birmingham.