New Releases by John Cassidy

Discusses the history and mechanics of yo-yos. Illustrates techniques for playing with the yo-yo.

An introduction to the art of throwing, the science of understanding, and the need for avoiding the Australian boomerang, an object which flies in accordance with advanced principles of aerodynamics but in defiance of every shred of common sense.

Take soccer and mix it with juggling. This book introduces the 5 basic kicks, along with various games played with a footbag. Includes information on joining the World Footbag Association.

John Cassidy''s poems are mostly descriptive, often portraits of people, or scenes from the natural world. Caught in sharp-edged detail, the subject is explored as the poem is shaped; the movement and imagery draw out and clarify the implicit significance of a particular situation or experience. Frequently energised by the meeting of opposites, the poems embody both hesitation and conflict in the texture of their language. Night Cries is John Cassidy''s second book-length collection. It includes the poems from his Bloodaxe pamphlets Changes of Light and The Fountain, which Dick Davis in PN Review praised for their ''wary ease'' - one of Cassidy''s own phrases. ''His best poems are very fine: fastidiously put together but not at all dandified, engaging with reality... He often deals in placid surfaces that mask a buried violence or vitality, and he does so with meticulous and self-effacing diction.'' Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

A sudden change of light can transform our perception of the familiar world. Holding such moments of tension, John Cassid gains insights into a situation as he shapes a poem around it. In this new group of poems, he has extended his territory to cover apprehensions of time; his progress is wary but determined, and always held in check by the sureness of his craft. The poems are concerned with the idea of time in many of its aspects: with chance and causality, perspective and circumstance, change and persistence, youth and age. They vary in their approach; some are observations, some speculations, some less formally shaped than others. Changes of Light is published simultaneously with The Fountain, a pamphlet comprising those poems from John Cassidy''s booklet, The Dancing Man (Poet''s Yearbook Award, 1977), which were not included in Cassidy''s book, An Attitude of Mind (Hutchinson, 1978). The title-poem, ''The Fountain'', was the precursor of the time poems of Changes of Light.

The Fountain is a reissue of those poems from John Cassidy''s booklet, The Dancing Man, which were not included in his book, An Attitude of Mind (Hutchinson, 1978). They formed part of a collection which won him the first Poet''s Yearbook Award in 1977. Cassidy''s poems are mostly descriptive, often portraits of people, or scenes from the natural world. Caught in sharp-edged detail, the subject is explored as the poem is shaped, so that the implicit significance of a particular observation or experience is uncovered by the defining action of the poem''s language and imagery, and in the harmonising of its rhythms. The Fountain is published simultaneously with Changes of Light, a pamphlet of new poems all concerned, in various ways, with apprehensions of time; they develop ideas which Cassidy had started to explore in ''The Fountain'', the title-poem of this pamphlet.