Mangan Press/Catalogue/Cold Frame
Poetry · Spring 2026
Cold Frame
Marguerite Dunn
A fourth collection, written across two winters in a borrowed garden.
£12.00 · 86 pages · published 9 April 2026 · 978-1-9999999-2-7
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Marguerite Dunn spent the winters of 2023 and 2024 looking after a friend's allotment in Sheffield while that friend was ill. Cold Frame is the book that came out of it: forty-one poems about hardening off, about waiting, about the specific patience required by a season in which almost nothing is supposed to happen.
Dunn has always been a poet of the useful object, and here she has an entire shed of them — the dibber, the string line, the cracked pane propped with a brick. She is very good on the ethics of borrowing: what you may prune in someone else's garden, what you must leave, how to hand back a plot that is now, unavoidably, partly yours.
The collection is quieter than her last, and stranger. Several poems break off mid-argument. One is a list of what was in the freezer. The effect is cumulative rather than immediate; these are poems built to be reread in a different month.
Her friend recovered. The last poem is nine lines long and does not mention this.
A cold frame is a promise made in glass: / that whatever is inside will not be asked / to do anything yet. Only to keep. / Only to hold its ground at four degrees / and think about it.
I pricked out ninety seedlings that were not mine / into pots that were not mine, and wrote the date / on masking tape, and did not write the name, / because I knew it, and because she would be back / before it mattered which of us was sure.
- Format
- Sewn paperback with flaps, 216 × 135 mm
- Extent
- 86 pages
- Paper
- Munken Print Cream 100 gsm
- Binding
- Section-sewn, 350 gsm Colorplan cover, foredge flaps
- Typeface
- Arnhem, 11 / 17 pt
- Cover
- Two-colour lithography with a blind-embossed pane
- Edition
- 850 copies
- ISBN
- 978-1-9999999-2-7
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