“Fern Blossom“
by Dr. Sonja Strode (published 2024)

About the book...

Throughout the ages cold midwinter nights, spent huddled around a flickering hearth, often stoked mysterious, exciting or heart–wrenching stories and songs; undoubtedly, they would have been infused with myths and legends. Warm summer evenings can do the same. Such a balmy evening once engendered a lively conversation between the author and her Estonian guests; it sparked, too, much discussion about fern blossom (sõnajalaõis), the title of the book.

Using her feminist voice in a unique, imaginative manner, in “Fern Blossom” (2024) Sonja offers thought–provoking links with that enigmatic forest flower, linguistic and literary development, mythology, history, war and freedom.

Like a blacksmith, she hammers into her narrative her life–long engagement with such issues and her love of poetry. Included in “Fern Blossom” are some of her poems, a few having been set to music by her husband.

Influential in her writing of “Fern Blossom”, however, are Sonja’s previous literary (prose and poetry) academic studies in south Wales, London, and in France in the so–called ‘swinging sixties’ and seventies era. Flashes of inspiration for some of her earlier poems, and for her professional career during those years – set against a burgeoning popular music scene in London – were generated by her reading of French, English, and Greek writers, Welsh ‘treasures’ like Dylan Thomas, as well as the then new–style, humorous poetic voices collectively known as the ‘Beat Poets’.

On Sonja’s literary anvil in this book, a special space is also accorded to a feminist voice from across the ‘Pond’: notably that of Adrienne Rich, a well–known American ‘second–wave’ feminist in the late sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond; a space, too, for their mutual love of trees.