red botinki

and this is it!

2011-12-04T11:07:00.000-08:00

Hawthornden

2011-12-01T05:58:00.000-08:00

Delighted, and dizzy, to hear I've been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2012....
A month in a castle to write, and what a castle!!

Permissions

2011-10-11T03:38:00.001-07:00

I mentioned the poem chosen for the NPD educational resource in my last blog; it struck me after posting it that I had not been told by Jan Fortune at Cinnamon Press that the poem had been asked for. Unusual; Jan is very efficient. So I enquired, and she had not been approached. So then of course I enquired of NPD itself and received fulsome apologies.
It's very careless to post someone else's poem publicly without their express permission, and this is the first time this has happened to me. I've had poems asked for by Martin Halsall of third way magazine, Tina Ballantine of Mixed Nerve, Abegail Morley for the New Writer and her blogspot, and twice by people involved with cancer or healing projects: Sally Givertz asked if she could use a poem for a workshop and a friend asked for the use of a poem for a cancer support website. Among others. But always permission has been sought.
So, writers out there, be vigilant! If you find someone using any or part of your work without your permission, tackle them about it.

Games

2011-09-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

I have just discovered that a poem of mine is being used as a teaching example for 9-11 year-olds on the theme of Games, this year's chosen topic for National Poetry Day. The poem is "Football, Kuala Lumpur - you can find it on the Education link of the National Poetry Day website, or in my book "The Plucking Shed" (Cinnamon Press).

Alas, I am too tired to post it here at this moment; I'm just back from Cumbria, a trip that was a very generous birthday gift from my friend Ann. We went in her motor-home and I took my small dog along. The only game we played was "Quick! Stop the dog from getting out!" every time we opened the door. For an old dog - Asha is almost 16 - she's very nippy.

We had three days of very mixed weather- we visited Aira Force in the pouring rain and as we were coming down (once, of course, that we were soaked through!) the sun came out and created a double rainbow in the torrent of spray. Stunningly beautiful. We also had the great good luck to see a red squirrel, the first I have ever seen so I was thrilled - that alone was a perfect birthday gift so thank you, Ann, for making that possible!

Home sweet home

2011-09-08T12:39:00.001-07:00

Well, after the hurly burly of a wedding there is nothing like home. And there's my favourite sofa .....

CLOTHES, MAKE-UP, HAIR = WEDDINGS!!

2011-08-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

It was my youngest daughter's wedding this month and I don't need to state that she looked glowing, radiant, and wonderful. Of course she did!
Even I underwent the - for me - doubtful pleasures of make-up and hair-do. I usually prefer the good fresh air on my skin, unimpeded by cosmetics. But it was a wedding and so I sat obediently in the make-up artist's chair and watched while she took years off me (I have since got them back and that's fine!) She was tactful, gentle, and very good at her job and while I was sitting there I remembered another Artiste in the world of female glamour who had been equally gentle and good at his craft.

For he was a man, in Malaysia, in Penang in fact; he was what the Malays called a Lady Boy. They're a very special kind of transvestite with wiles and ways that truly out-feminine the feminine. This one was so delicate in his touch; he had immaculately manicured hands with long fingers and exquisite pink nails; and at these elegant and gentle hands I had the best haircut ever, and also the best hairdressing experience of my life. He did not begin with washing my hair, but rather by soaping it with shampoo and then applying massage to the scalp and also - interestingly - to the ears. I had no idea the ears were such a sensory zone but after a short time of his stroking the outer shell and then cleaning daintily with his nail the inner channel I was ready to fall apart I was so relaxed.

I've never known a hairdresser in the UK do this but it's brilliant. In fact this was a far better way of taking years off a person than make-up! I came out of that shop looking good and feeling good.

So much so that when my daughter and I returned to our modest hotel, by taxi, because I had a severely damaged foot from falling off a ferry, the staff rushed to help carry my shopping for me. You might think that was on account of my terrible limp but I think not since we'd been staying there already three nights and been thoroughly ignored.

Ah well, unlike Frank Churchill in Jane Austen's "Emma" who goes flying off to London for a - supposed -haircut I cannot expect to fly off to Penang for mine so memory will have to suffice!
And finally, needless to say, the wedding was wonderful, the best and most relaxed wedding I've ever attended and I was not alone in saying that. I have "fallen apart" since in the best posible way - crumbling into a soft heap of fragmented meringue with no intention of putting myself together again just yet. I am quite enjoying myself as a collapsed meringue on the floor....

William

2011-07-27T11:02:00.000-07:00

It's wonderful when a young lad approaches you at a reading to say how much he likes one of your poems. William told me he liked The Squirrel poem very much and that he and his mum sing it together, following Polly Bolton's musical setting of the poem.
So for William, from Ludlow, and anyone else who likes squirrels, here's the poem:

The Squirrel

sparks from branch to branch,
an arc of energy, ferris wheel,
small explosion,
whip of current
loosed among the trees.

Sometimes

2011-07-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted a poem on this blog for a long time, so while I have been thinking and writing about gardens and flowers, here's a garden poem:

Sometimes

all it takes to be happy
is a line of washing
drying gently in the sun,
a fork stuck in a border,
sunlight falling through leaves,

striking the gold rim
of the blackbird's eye
as it watches from the fence
for the digging to be done.

This is one of my poems that was set to music by singer and choir leader Polly Bolton and performed at the recent Much Wenlock Poetry Festival.

Weeks of Perfume

2011-07-04T04:38:00.001-07:00

In Chester near where I live the lime trees are all in flower and the scent is magnificent. Bees love these flowers. Years ago when I was ill in a local cottage hospital the night nurse Theresa told me how one hot summer she came home one day to find her lawn covered in drunk bumble bees - they'd overdosed on the lime tree outside her house and couldn't move! A bit like the way humans behave on Friday nights in Chester....

It's a time of perfume; lavender is in bloom in my garden, the rose Albertine, and sweet rocket, that old-fashioned cottage flower that few people grow now but I grow it near a seat. At night its scent fills the garden.
Privet is in flower too and its scent always takes me straight back to a house I once lived in by the sea. It had a "burgage" garden, a very long, thin strip of land bordered by privet hedges (nearly three hundred yards of hedge- a lot of cutting!). In the evening, to stroll down the path was to be accompanied by the flutter and dart of hundreds of night moths feeding on the privet blossom. Further down the garden there was a dense bed of evening primrose and in June this was always the site of ghost swift moths dipping and lifting over the flowers, like frail floating scraps of paper.. I have always tried to plant my gardens to attract insects; a summer without insect hum and flight is no summer at all.
In my garden here I have a self-seeded thick stand of poppies and in the morning when they open the flowers are full of bees and hoverflies; as the day goes on and the petals fall on these highly ephemeral flowers the bees move on to the borage and the lavender. I so love to watch them. A good stretch of "sitting and staring", or standing and staring, as W H Davies recommended is called for in these fine summer days of glorious scent and fulsomeness.

Shoes to Die For?

2011-06-12T13:03:00.001-07:00

This is a genuine pair of Christian Louboutin Shoes. They are not mine but I have tried them on, and oh dear heart, what a sensation - elegant, soft as a caress, amazingly easy to walk in, oh, shoes made by a man who really understands a woman's foot and body alignment. No wonder they are so expensive (it will never be my lot to own a pair!!) The red sole is his hall-mark.

I have referred to Christian Louboutin's highly glamorous and beautiful shoes in poetry workshops I have run on the subject of Shoes, but never dreamed I would ever try a pair on. And now I have and I felt like a million "million dollars", but alas the shoes have departed with their new owner. But I have tried on the ultimate "glass slipper" in foot-wear and could now die happy (except I'm not ready yet...)

Sentinelle Blog

2011-06-05T04:15:00.000-07:00

Have just found three of my poems "gems from past issues" of Sentinel magazine posted on the Sentinelle blog. What a nice surprise!! And I love surprises.

A Splash of Happiness!

2011-06-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

This spring I have finally succeeded in having enough lily of the valley in flower to call a display (more truthfully a splash). Various neighbours and friends have given me roots over the last 5 years and at last there is a considerable spread of them. In the language of flowers they indicate "the return of happiness", and I was certainly happy to see them bloom! The French are more accurate than we are in calling them muguets des bois, (of the woods), rather than of the valley as we do. They like a semi-woodland setting. Mine are under a shrub rose, a tall buddleia, and a tree of heaven. Heaven and happiness together - I wish!

But they have accompanied a period of joy - the other pic was taken at the British Academy where I went (for the second year running) to receive 3rd prize in the English Fellows' Prize for Poetry. It is a lovely evening of awards for poetry and for children's fiction. The winning poems are read out, and the winning and shortlisted children's books are set out on display. Walker Books did very well this year, carrying off several prizes.A very likeable trio turned up from their group and how young they all seemed! (How old I must have seemed...)

I met Frances Thompson who was the second prize winner. C J Allen, who won 1st, did not come - shame as I was intrigued to see who he was ( I think he's a 'he') as he seems to win a great number of prizes in poetry competitions.
The prizes were presented by Jane Draycott who was very embarrassed as she mispronounced my surname. I forgave her, of course!

I like the fact that I'm standing in front of a banner that says "at the forefront of English" though you can scarcely see it in the pic, but I know it's there -that's exactly where poetry should be: the late Josephine Hart wrote that poets are "the gods of language".
I don't feel much like a "god" but I do know that poetry is a gift and a very special one, and that it is never easy to write a really good poem. Brevity is very deceptive!

Scattering Notes like Bright Pennies

2011-05-04T09:41:00.000-07:00

This is the title of the performance that Polly Bolton, her choir Larks and I did on May 1st at the recent Much Wenlock Poetry Festival. The programme that we collaborated on was based entirely on my poems, many of which Polly has set to music, and the result of her musical inspiration, my words, and Larks' singing was truly magnificent. I honestly think, from the enthusiastic feedback we got at the end of it, that our audience was very satisfied, or as some put it "BLOWN AWAY"!
Polly is on the left of this photo, in white, I'm on the right, in green. Larks were all wearing turquoise.
We were given Holy Trinity Church, the main parish church of Much Wenlock as our venue and what a venue- gloriously light and airy, with excellent accoustics. Larks' voices soared like the real thing! (The title of the event is taken from my poem The Skylark).
It is also a very large space and we were very anxious to begin with as we watched people filtering in, wondering if it would fill. And it did! I'd like to thank all the friends who came from the Chester area to support it, and also to offer my warm thanks to Larks and Polly for an amazing musical experience of my own poems. Not forgetting the Festival organisers for hosting us!

This festival at Much Wenlock is only in its second year but it is a real delight. The town is small and very friendly. A shuttle bus service is provided to take people from the town to the bigger events at the Edge centre just outside the town and the Festival team could not be more welcoming.I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Imtiaz Dharker, Jo Shapcott and Andrew Motion reading at the Edge, on the Saturday, and would have liked to have heard Mario Petrucci on the Sunday but his reading clashed with our performance. You have to decide what to miss, and I missed Roger Garfitt, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Henry and Simon Armitage among many other events. But I had a really great time even so.It's just a great place! Put it in your diary for next year - I'm sure this festival will go from strength to strength.

Review of The Plucking Shed

2011-04-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

Hoorah! A brief review of "The Plucking Shed" in Other Poetry says 'an astonishing focus on what, in the poems, seems to be the thinnest of gaps between human and non-human worlds......A very impressive achievement'

I have also had a great review from Abegail Morley on her wordpress site, and I know there will be one in the magazines Artemis 6 and Tears in the Fence, although with this latter I understand that David Caddy is having difficulty finding finance for the magazine. (If you're flush, make his day and buy a copy, or subscribe)

With Abegail's review I really felt my work had been understood. Occasionally people have dismissed my work as being about the domestic - it's not, it's far from that. It may take the domestic as a base but then it moves out to explore other things, often the brutality of nature red in tooth and claw, but frequently tempered by humour. It is as Helena Nelson has said "far from reassuring".

Mandy Coe

2011-03-17T03:35:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, for Mandy Coe's launch of "If you could see laughter", her book of poems for children. Mandy has a dazzling smile, an easy-going manner of presenting her poems, a very clear voice and is an object lesson for any poet in how to give a good reading. Moreover she obviously enjoys reading and believes in her work! I think this is very important, to believe wholeheartedly in the value of what you are offering your audience. They have come to hear you; they expect the best - up to you to give them the best, your best. Which is what Mandy does, in spades.

Brigid's day, goddess of Fire, Inspiration, and Healing

2011-02-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

I am very fond of Candlemas, both the Christian festival of Feb 2nd superimposed on the old pagan beliefs, and of the pagan beliefs themselves.
When I first began this blog I wrote that February in Finnish is helmikuu, the month of the pearl,when ice melts to pearls and refreezes, and this is appropriate for Bride is also associated with healing wells. But it is fire that I'm thinking of today, in particular a fire you can't see but that I experienced a long time ago. This is from part of my diary.

Post-natal in the “Swell Hotel”, 1960’s.

That’s what it was called, the Rotunda lying-in Hospital. Giving birth there, unless you were a private patient, was considered a penance.

The only uses I had ever known for Jeyes fluid had been on farms, for swilling down the floors of the milking parlour, or for swabbing animals down after injury. When it was poured into a bucket of water its white density spread out slowly, pale threads spiralled up through the water until all the liquid in the bucket looked like a thin, treacherous milk. The smell of it never left your nose.

In this ward for the newly-delivered the nurses came each day with their cruel Aladdin’s lamp of the stuff, forced each of us in turn onto our backs with our knees raised and while one of the harridans forced your legs apart, the other slipped a bedpan under you and poured a gush of the savage fluid between your legs. Your skin went on fire, you wanted to leap from bed and run screaming to find plain water and douse yourself. They held you down.
“Now,” they said as they moved on down the ward “none of ye’s ‘ll get an infection down there!”

Soon the ward was full of ripe curses, howls and roars, none of it coming from the cosy bundles in the rocking cradles suspended at the end of our beds. The needle-sharp, burning stink of it filled the air and by lunchtime when we were all prodded out of our beds to sit at the long table down the centre of the ward the sausages and potatoes stank of it too.

Later when you lay back and watched the flames of the huge open fire at the end of the ward flickering cheerfully and the terry nappies drying round it on the wooden clothes-airers, even the sweet smell of the laundry soap would not banish the Jeyes. And you shuddered as you remembered that next morning they’d be back to do it all over again.

OWNING A DOG

2011-01-25T04:25:00.000-08:00

I've owned dogs almost all my life, whenever it was possible to do so. I like them. Owning a dog is fun, it's companionable, and it makes you get out and walk even when the rain is pouring down. You become quite a connoisseur of weather and its variations because you are out in it every day.
You meet other dog-owners; this can be good, meaning you make new acquaintance; and can be not good as in you discover the true depths of British sentimentality over your little pooch (all pooches, large and small).It has no limits; it even considers you to be the dog's "MUM".
I just want to make it absolutely clear that in all my life I have NEVER, NEVER given birth to a dog...

AN AFTERNOON OF BIRDS

2010-12-13T02:04:00.001-08:00

Grey Hen Press have just brought out a beautiful anthology of poems about birds called "No Space But Their Own"; I have three poems in it, and very short poems they are too! On Saturday the 11th December, Lynn Alderson, Joan Poulson, Gina Shaw, Jo Haslam, Joy Howard and I all gave a reading from it in Todmorden library to a very satisfactory audience who were packed in on every manner of chair the library could assemble, and still there weren't enough!
It was very pleasant, the reading accompanied by plentiful mince pies and wine, and each of us had a generous 12 minutes, so that as well as readings from the book (mine took barely two of those twelve minutes - I do somewhat specialise in short poems!) we could read other poems as long as they included birds, even a mere "token" bird. Well, this was something like my idea of heaven, a whole afternoon spent listening to poems about birds and they were excellent poems too. It was every bit as good as an afternoon spent watching birds!

Anyone who likes birds would really love this anthology. And it has illustrations too, done by Emma Stansfield. One of my poems about the heron sits opposite one of her spare and exact sketches,and since my poems are also spare, they suit each other perfectly!

The bird in my photo is a fan-tailed dove that just happened on my roof during snowy weather and it looks like a snow-bird.

Woodcock seem to be appearing out of their seclusion this weather: the poet Matt Merritt mentions a sighting on his blog of a woodcock seen in Leicester, and another poet, Chris Kinsey, has seen one in Newtown, Powys. Do they only appear to poets? Well, this poet has never had the luck to see one. Yet...

Joy Howard, who runs Grey Hen Press, deserves great credit and admiration for her extraordinary energy in bringing out anthology after anthology, and there are two more in the pipeline.
There are some truly amazing women around and I have been lucky to be published by three of the most energetic women I know: Helena Nelson of Happen Stance Press, Jan Fortune-Wood of Cinnamon Press and Joy Howard of Grey Hen Press. And all by pure happenstance too.

HARLECH IN THE RAIN

2010-11-14T11:50:00.001-08:00

I have recently been on a week's writing course with the excellent Jan Fortune-Wood of Cinnamon Press (and other) fame. She is not only a very good tutor but also a brilliant cook, turning out super, comforting winter meals - moussakas, curries, stews - of great flavour and deliciousness. We assisted her, but only with rudimentary chopping of veg and general clearing up.
These good meals were even more welcome as every day broke with rain, fog and tearing winds. Daphne Gloag and I set off one afternoon for Harlech Castle and tried to ascend one of the towers, not for the view since there would not be one on account of thick mist, but merely for the hell of it. We were very nearly blown right out of it!
When it rains and rains and rains you either stay in or you brave it. I badly wanted to get to Morfa Harlech, the nature reserve, so again Daphne and I, together with Becky Gethin, set off in my car for an expedition thereto. We didn't get there. There is no road access at all. Tough on us, but perfect for the wading birds!

However we did get to Ynys to find this wonderful tiny church set behind an avenue of irish yew trees that were showering the path with red beries. Ynys mean "island" and this church, set on a high hill with three foot paths leading off it in different directions, probably once was an island. Becky took this great photo of the church and its open bell tower.

During the week we all benefitted from a great deal of personal one-to-one mentoring, and I'd like to thank Jan very much for this, and also to thank all the other poets and novelists who were sharing the week both for their company and for their helpful comments`on my work in progress.

And one day I'd like to see Harlech in the sunshine. Or at least see it without impenetrable mist...

No Excuse?

2010-10-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

I have been neglecting this blog for weeks, but I'm back again. Meanwhile my book The Plucking Shed has been joyfully launched and I have been very busy doing readings from it, most recently with Judy Gahagan, Martyn Crucefix and Mike Loveday at Poetry in Palmers Green. I very much enjoyed hearing the others read: I had already seen a poem of Mike Loveday's in the recent issue of Assent, and I really liked the fine lyrical quality of Martyn Crucefix's work while Judy Gahagan was taking a most fascinating tour through the idea of "frontiers" as suggested by clothing.

This coming weekend Poem Catchers (myself and Judy Ugonna) are running a workshop for Chester Literature Festival, after which I am presenting my group The Poem Shed to do a reading. All details are on Chester Literature Festival's website.

More anon...

YORKSHIRE

2010-06-06T01:57:00.000-07:00

Off to Yorkshire for a few days to do a reading at the Georgian Theatre, Richmond, on Monday June 7th, as part of a group I belong to called The Band who are: Pat Borthwick, Ed Reiss, John Wedgwood Clarke, Hazel Cameron, and, previously, Caroline Carver.
Then later in the week I'll be going to the East Bridlington Poetry Festival not only to attend some of the exciting events on offer but also to receive my Runner-up award in the East Riding Poetry Competition.
I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Paul Durcan read his poetry as I have three of his collections: The Berlin Wall Cafe; Christmas Day; and Crazy About Women. They are wry, sad and funny, off-the-wall and absolutely so Paul Durcanish no-one could possibly imitate him. I love his work! If you have never come across his poetry before find some and read him. He's a tonic - there is simply nobody like him.

KIMONO

2010-05-21T04:34:00.001-07:00

A writing weekend in Herefordshire. A long time ago. Most of us had to share a room. I arrived first, unpacked and hung my beautiful kimono behind the bathroom door. This kimono, black with striking embroidered butterflies, always made me feel elegant, tall. I am not tall.

The room allotted to me and my as yet unmet room-mate looked out over a wide valley of polythene "lakes", under which strawberries were nestling. The polythene was dazzling in the sun, and as I turned away to avoid being blinded the door flew open and Geraldine arrived, throwing her case down, running about and exclaiming with delight over the wide view, the bars of chocolate and bottles of wine plus Honesty Box provided, the space. She bounced twice on the bed then raced into the bathroom to inspect that too. A joyful shriek of delight followed her, then out she came, wearing my kimono.

"Look at the robes they provide here!" she squealed "Aren't they fab?!"

It was very hard to tell her it was mine and that the provided robes were those underneath, those white towelling robes that, though comfortable, make everyone look a fat white cocoon... For a moment her face was so crestfallen I found myself almost wanting to give the kimono to her.

Now I wish I had: Geraldine died two years later, quite unexpectedly, of breast cancer. When I was ill myself with ovarian cancer this kimono was the one thing that helped me retain my sense of dignity. It helped me walk tall, even when I was quaking inside.
I so wish I had given poor Geraldine the means of walking tall.

ECO POETRY IN LLANGOLLEN

2010-05-17T04:51:00.000-07:00

Robbie Burton who runs the Cross Border Stanza of the Poetry Society organised a workshop day at Llangollen, at Plas Newydd, the former home (and now museum) of the Two Ladies of Llangollen. Appropriate, since, in their day, many well-known poets and writers came here to visit these two infamous women.

Robbie had invited David Morley to come and lead the workshop and it was one of the most challenging and hectic days I've ever attended. We were set wonderful tasks: sent out into the grounds to interview a tree or other item from the natural world; sent out again to make an attempt at imitating the rhythm of bird song in our poems; again to create a new form, either in syllabics or possibly a concrete poem by using some form of mathematics in our writing about natural things. We had the use of a Sonic Explorer for the bird song exercise - a very simple machine like an ear trumpet with head phones that greatly amplifies sound - and this was a joy to use. Suddenly a single song comes through loud and clear as if you've never heard it before; just like being present at the Creation itself!

We finished the day by making poetry installations in the woodlands; I worked with Martin Zarrop and sent him scurrying about for pebbles, ramsons, leaves and twigs and together we made the three-line three-word poem pictured above on the right.

Wood
land
song

We had to use a rough crochet for the song bit as we ran out of pebbles and time (David set the strictest time limits on all our activities!)

Pictured centre is Robbie's own installation, a poem about Crow Castle which refers to Dinas Bran, the castle on the distant hill opposite these standing stones in the centre of the lawn at Plas Newydd.

And left is David himself pointing out the spider's web that someone else's succinct installation (two words only: Spinning Workshop) led to.
The day ended with an amazing happening: one of the group, Diane, sang to us, a beautiful song and a beautiful voice. She stood on steps by the cafe and filled the air with her singing.
What finer end to a poetry day could you have? I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it but I have to confess I could hardly get out of bed this morning: I was exhausted! But it was really well worth a little fatigue.

A GREAT WEEKEND

2010-05-11T04:09:00.001-07:00

Left to right on this image are: yours truly, the poetry input for the weekend; Sue Harris, singing input; Gitika Partington, likewise; Kate, participant from Sheffield who runs singing groups there; and Polly Bolton, the organiser and singing facilitator.
Sue Harris (Herefordshire) runs singing groups, plays the dulcimer, and does gigs with poet Roger Garfitt.
Gitika Partington creates musicals for children in schools, runs a choir in London and is involved in the Berkshire educational project Sing Up.
Polly Bolton runs the Oak Barn workshops, a choir called Larks, and an a cappella group called Polisumi. She has also created a wonderful CD of her sung version of Housman's A Shropshire Lad, with the poems read by Nigel Hawthorne.
This was a weekend of writing your own songs and it's right to say it was a brilliant weekend. In every photograph I took everyone looks so absorbed and happy.

It began with my workshop, a rapid burst of writing exercises to get people going and I was so impressed by what came out: a lovely poem about the humble dandelion flowering in a Tesco car park; phrases like a branch of birds /the oxygen corridor/ singing the stars to sleep; and some very touching and also funny poems about items of clothing we have loved (or hated). I was delighted with the way the group plunged into the tasks set, and later both delighted and surprised that in the set-aside time for one-to-ones I didn't have a single space left. People brought me songs they were working on, poems they'd written and wanted help with, and lines they thought could be turned into song. It really was a great joy working with them all.
Not only that but when the rest of the time was spent in singing some of the work produced, what a treat it was for me to listen to all these experienced singers harmonising, creating new threads of melody, and giving voice like a million skylarks rising to sing. I'll never forget it! I had a wonderful, wonderful weekend.

SHROPSHIRE EVENT

2010-05-05T03:23:00.000-07:00

This weekend I shall be near Ludlow, running a poetry workshop for natural voice practitioners. They will be seeking to learn how to write simple lyrics for songs suitable for a-capella style singing. I am bringing a whole bagful of poetry collections, including the work of Jane Kenyon, Gillian Clarke, Diana Hendry, Michael Swan, Charles Bennett, Marita Over and Chris Kinsey, plus some anthologies for people to look through. We'll be looking at some of my own poems that have been set to song by musician Polly Bolton, and at simple verse forms, the use of refrain, the importance of simplicity. This is the first time I have worked with natural voice practitioners and I am really looking forward to it. Over the course of the weekend some of the work we produce will be turned into song and we'll all join in!

JOYOUS NEWS!

2010-04-28T02:15:00.000-07:00

I don't normally post so soon, preferring to use this blog as an occasional tool for speculation /ramblings about life, and nature and poetry.

BUT I have just heard that I won third Prize in the English Association Fellows' Prize, and I am at this moment a very happy woman!

Even happier because what inspired the poem was an amazing and tiny bird called the club-winged manakin which actually makes an exquisite note using its wing feathers, rather in the manner that the cricket makes music by strumming its legs down its wings.

Every day of my life I find the natural world more astonishing - what a joy to be alive and learn these things!

ZEST!

2010-04-27T07:28:00.001-07:00

Last night was the first Zest! Open Floor Poetry Night of the year. At Alexander's Jazztheatre Bar, Rufus Court, Chester. Our guest poet was Andrew Rudd who gave an excellent reading and included one of my favourite poems "The Baker" (from Andrew's collection One Cloud away from the Sky). He also did a wonderful poem about the wall-hanging in Alexander's that glamourises the stage. It features a band in black silhouette on a bright back ground of strong colours; over the years this hanging has got slightly battered, probably by leaping musicians catching their heels in it and tearing away a bit of the applique, but this slight touch of the shabby is what makes Alexander's such a special place: it feels well used and exudes a real atmosphere of "this is the place where it HAPPENS"!, as if so much goes on here (and it does) that there's no time for fripperies. Our audience love it here, and we love it here. The microphones are excellent. The bar staff are excellent. And the lighting is kind, not too bright, nor too dim. You don't feel at all conspicuous which is very helpful to first-time or nervous readers. (Sometimes these are the readers who offer the most amazing poems; we had a fantastic poem about the rhinoceros last night, described as a Zeppelin - wonderful image!)

Yesterday there were 52 people gathered together in Alexander's to read and to listen to poetry - that's not bad, is it?
On our opening night in March 2007 we had a packed house of over 80 people and so far the numbers have never dropped below the 50 mark. I feel that's a very good indication of the value and pleasure to be had from poetry, particularly as we do get a high proportion of people who come simply to listen.

Often at Open Floor nights a theme emerges, or some element of connection: last night we had a fair selection of "list poems" from Adele, Francesca, and Katherine among others. Even Andrew's poem about the wall-hanging was a sort of list poem. Twenty people bravely got up to read their own work. We like to have as an many open floor readers as the night can fit in, on the understanding that it's one poem each. Most accept this quite happily, a few are disgruntled, but we like to give everyone a chance.
Our next Zest! event is Monday June 28th, at 8pm, and our guest poet will be Mandy Coe. If you happen to be in Chester that evening drop in to Alexanders!

IT'S TRULY SPRING, GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING

2010-04-23T01:56:00.000-07:00

On the way back from Ellesmere and the heronry we stopped at Erbistock, for the Boat Inn, which is hidden away in the most wonderful spot beside the river Dee. The woods bordering the lane that leads there were full of wood anemones, and the wood sorrel featured here. It is such a delicate plant with graceful stems and flowers and elegantly folded leaves. For me, more than any other flower, the wood sorrel is Spring: I remember it so much from my childhood when every wood was full of it nestling among mosses and leaf mould.

But spring flowers aren't the only things whose blossoming time comes round just now -
a friend and I are setting up a new poetry venture called Poem Catchers. See the new link at the right to our website. It was designed by a very talented young man named Gavin Roberts who works under the name The Design Drop. We're very pleased with what he has produced for us and we are looking forward to all that Poem Catchers will bring!

HERON

2010-04-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

Visited Ellesmere in Shropshire last weekend to see the heronry. The Visitor's Centre have cameras trained on the nests and there were 2 nests with three young herons in. It is wonderful watching them, the young are fluffy and strangely ET-like with their long scraggy necks. I was told I could take pictures of the camera images but there were so many reflections from glass, screen, water etc this was the best shot I could get. But I'm posting it even though it's not perfect.
There are five meres in this part of Shropshire and it is known as the Shropshire Lake District. Ellesmere is an excellent place for watching birds: goosander, golden eye and tufted duck, herons, swans, coots, moorhens and mallards. And in Cremorne gardens around the lake which has a lot of woodland and rough clearings I have seen marsh tits.
The lake and gardens were given to the county by Baron Brownlow whose full name was Peregrine Francis Adelbert - isn't that a fantastic name!

LATEST NEWS FROM RED BOTINKI

2010-04-09T04:49:00.000-07:00

This Saturday I am running a poetry workshop in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, a gloriously tiny but beautiful town that boasts an excellent bookshop run by the enterprising Anna Dreda, who has put this first ever Much Wenlock Poetry Festival into action.

My workshop will be in the Pinefield Community rooms, from 2pm -4pm on Sat April 10th, and my subject for inspiration is Shoes, remarkably iconic items.

Other poets taking part in the festival include our Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Daljit Nagra, Paul Henry, Roz Goddard, Roger McGough, Menna Elfyn, Imtiaz Dharker, Sally Richards and Gladys Mary Coles. Apologies to anyone I've missed.
Plus singer Polly Bolton is giving a live performance of her settings of Housman's "A Shropshire Lad".

Polly runs the Oak Barn Workshops and offers a good programme of singing workshops throughout the year. I will be taking an active role soon on one of Polly's weekends, a song writing weekend in early May on which I am the facilitator for words and short poems which can be turned into a cappella song. Polly Bolton, Gitika Partington and Sue Harris will be the musicians who will do the rest!

But as well as the above I also have the good news that I won a runner-up place in this year's East Riding Open Poetry Competition, judged by Jacob Polley. The awards event will take place on June 12th, as part of the Bridlington Poetry Festival and I hope to be there to read my poem, Snowdrops. It is already displayed on the Bridlington Poetry festival website.

The poem is one of a group of - very unflattering - poems about snowdrops. I seem to have it in for the poor snowdrop since a friend who absolutely loved them took her own life.

But I'm sure that one day I'll be celebrating them again. Although I have to say there is something fascinatingly sinister about them. Another friend, also a passionate galanthophile, told me that snowdrops produce a substance in their leaves that protects them from bitter temperatures and frost, rather like the antifreeze we put in our cars, and that's why they can flower in the depths of winter.
Nature is always a source of surprise....

AND WHAT YOU FIND ELSEWHERE

2010-04-02T07:05:00.001-07:00

I like the way the celandines are reflected in the water here - there is nothing like a double dose of spring!

Although just at the moment in England it is so cold it feels as if winter has returned.....

WHAT YOU FIND IN THE GARDEN AFTER WINTER.

2010-03-27T11:39:00.001-07:00

A whole "caravan" of snails glued to each other, their shells sealed with their mucilaginous slime to protect them from the cold. Isn't Nature wonderful!

THE PLUCKING SHED

2010-03-16T02:22:00.000-07:00

At last!! The cover of my new book, my first full collection of poetry, published by Cinnamon Press.

It's already on their poetry list with some very fine comments, although it is not due out until July.

The launch will be held in

Alexander's Jazztheatre Bar,
Rufus Court,
Chester, CH1 2JW.

on Monday July 19th at about 8 pm. Alexander's is a place with great atmosphere and good microphone systems, perfect for a book launch. It's also the place where my friends and I hold (packed) Open Floor Poetry nights, known as Zest!

I can't wait to hold a copy of The Plucking Shed in my very own hands. The book has been in preparation for over eighteen months, mainly because Cinnamon's lists and publishing schedule were so full, and during that time I have experienced an amazing creative rush, writing far more poems than this one book can hold. So at some point I shall have to start thinking about a second collection. But for now I just want to rejoice in this wonderful feeling of anticipation (which is occasionally dispelled brutally by waking in the night and thinking oh grief, suppose the reviews are bad...? And then - no, Redbotinki, don't go there, put your red boots on and keep walking!!)

SNAKESKIN AND HAPPENSTANCE

2010-03-04T05:20:00.000-08:00

The online poetry webzine Snakeskin, run by George Simmers, features no less than three Happenstance poets this month, Alison Brackenbury, D A Prince, and myself. A veritable Happenstance coup.

Both of my pamphlets have been published by Happenstance, and this press has a wonderful scheme whereby if you sign up as a subscriber you receive a free Happenstance pamphlet of your choice, a discount on other purchases, and also - and this is a remarkable thing - an annual copy of the Happenstance Story, published each year as a Chapter in the life of the press. It is totally fascinating to have this glimpse behind the scenes of a publisher's life, frustrations, joys and responsibilities and every poet can learn an enormous amount from reading it.

It's not expensive to subscribe: £7.50 per annum, and the benefits are great because this is a truly great press, with a very thorough and generous editor in Helena Nelson who takes time over her poets' work, gives superb editorial advice, and produces some fine pamphlets. The press was only established in 2005 and has already been shortlisted for the new Michael Marks award for pamphlet publishers. How could you not want to be part of a press that has published Michael Mackmin, D A Prince, Alison Brackenbury, Rob A Mackenzie, Matt Meritt, Sally Festing? Apologies to those I've missed out but the list is very long, which in itself is proof of the extraordinary dedication of this press to publishing excellence. Do yourself a huge favour - subscribe and enjoy the poems!

FINISHING THE QUILT THREAD

2010-03-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

This quilt was made to illustrate Thomas Hardy's poem "August Midnight". It was in the richest purples and blues and golds, made chiefly of velvets and silks, with some printing and also some embroidery. It was utterly sumptuous and, not surpisingly, had picked up a number of awards. My camera would not bring out all the detail in one shot - it was a big quilt, a huge undertaking. I was enchanted by it.

Here are some lines from Hardy's poem:

August Midnight

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
and the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
on this scene enter -winged, horned, spined -
a longlegs, a moth and a dumbledore.

The moth, in its gorgeous silks, is shown in the above picture, with part of the clock, and printed round the clock in a spiral was the whole poem. I kept going back to look again and again, thinking how wonderful poetry is if it inspires something so magnificent.

I have also been re-reading the poems of George Mackay Brown - they are spare and apparently very plain in their language yet rich, rich, in setting and atmosphere - read a dozen and you can smell the salt, the fish, see the small daffodils of the Orkney spring, feel the sun, and the winter cold.

Lines like this from "Island School" in which a fisherman's son and a young farm girl are shown leaving for school:

The boy

"leaves a small house
of sea light. He leaves
the sea smells, creel
and limpet and cod."

The girl

"comes, cornlight
in the eyes, smelling
of peat and cows
and the rich midden."

But the girl is late and arrives, running, to

"sit
among twenty whispers."

I just love it!

GEORGE MACKAY BROWN

2010-02-28T04:05:00.000-08:00

Poetry pops up in the most wonderful places. Even at Quilt Fairs! Two years ago at this fair there was an entire series of beautiful quilts made to illustrate some of George Mackay Brown's poems, the Orkney poet who "sang the islands".

The quilt here is inspired by his poem "A Calendar of Kings" in which he imagines the three kings journeying through the Orkneys, trading for fish, sleeping among dews, waking to the lark's song and, as in this quilt, folowing their star:

"A glim on the darkling road.
The star! It was their star.!"

February, a good month.

2010-02-27T11:05:00.000-08:00

February is the month of the International Quilt fair at Llangollen. The quilt pictured above is from last year's Fair, and was made by a member of a French quilting group. It reminds me of Susan Hill's "The Magic Apple Tree",

Just the other side of Llangollen is a small church at Llantysilio where the churchyard is completely smothered in snowdrops at this time of the year. So a happy day in Llangollen means a visit to the quilt fair followed by a visit to this church to enjoy the snowdrops. The church also has a special snowdrop service each year.

There are other good things about February: light is returning rapidly, it's still light at half past six in the evening and I rejoice!

Plus I have just been Highly Commended in the Slipstream Open Poetry Competition. And my friend Pat Borthwick won it!

All good stuff.

POSTED

2010-02-23T06:20:00.000-08:00

It was not my birthday, but it would be by the time I reached England again (I was leaving Helsinki on the Russian boat The Alexander Pushkin, and it was a four day sail to Tilbury Docks). Late August in Finland and the summer had run a rapid course from amazing light nights of no darkness, and therefore no sleep, to sudden short days with white mist and gloom by five in the afternoon and the hugest, reddest autumn moons I've ever seen rising above the black pine forests.

J was one of the Finnish International Folk Dance team, a huge farmer, with giant shoulders, a wide bright face with laughter in his eyes, and so light on his feet. When I first met him he had said "Hello, it is nice to see you, and you are nice to see!" I was attending a folk dance day in West Finland; one of the dancers was a fellow teacher at the folk school where I was teaching English for several months and she had invited me to come with her. At the time J sought me out I had lost interest in the dancing and was sitting on a swing in the hot sunshine, barefoot and happy so perhaps I did indeed look "nice to see."

We became friends and went dancing together a number of times. Dancing with J was to be lifted into the air and whirled round like a top; he was strong and he was powerful, an energetic but elegant dancer, and so much taller than me my feet never really touched the floor as we spun to crazy polkas and the fast-beat waltzes that were so popular then in Finland. And on the night of what J decided should be my birthday celebration, since I would not be spending the day itself in Finland, we had gone to a venue deep in the thick forests, where a specially set-up dance floor had been built in a clearing and we would dance in the open air under the stars and the moon. My Finnish was not good enough to fully understand why it had been built here, but it seemed to be some kind of ceremonial gesture to the ending of summer. And it was wonderful.
The only thing that spoiled the night was that when we arrived back at the one-storey block of rooms where I lived - and so did some of my students - the front door was firmly locked and I had no key. Soft knocking brought no response from anyone inside. It was very, very late and I couldn't summon help from any of the other teachers, and especially not the Head. This would have been a disgrace for me of giant proportions. Finland was sternly Lutheran then.

"It is no problem," said J "Come, we find a window!"

And we did: the only open window was the narrow window of one of the toilet cubicles. I climbed on his enormous shoulders, but couldn't wiggle my body through. We got down again to reconsider the situation.

"Ha!" he declared, "It is no problem. I post you, like letter!"

Before I could say a word he had snatched me up and delivered me feet first through the window. My leather-soled dancing shoes struck the top of the porcelain WC tank, skidded, and the rest of me followed rapidly with a terrible racket of rattling porcelain, banging toilet lids, and the heavy impact of a pair of flying feet and solid body crashing against the door. The dead would have wakened at the sound, and what I dreaded soon happened: the sound of running footsteps and the door being heaved ajar and a circle of astonished faces peering in at me.
"Englantilainen oppetaja!" they exclaimed, "English teacher!" and then suppressed giggles broke out followed by great volumes of laughter. J's muttered concern on the other side of the window went unheard. And soon, though bruised and embarassed, I was laughing too.
In my last few days of teaching there I had to endure the conspiratorial winks and smirks of my students, and carry on as if nothing unusual had taken place, until my last day when the effort was too much for all of us and we subsided into so much laughter together the other teachers came to see what was going on. How could I say? What could I say?

"It is big joke," the girls said, "Big, big joke!" More laughter.

Late that October a letter came from J saying " We had a little snow last week. But it went away like you did."

I think of him still when the first snow comes. But only briefly. It was a long time ago....

BIRTHDAYS!!

2010-02-06T13:36:00.001-08:00

This blog was one year old on Feb 2nd.

And the writers' group I belong to, Words and Biscuits, was 10 years old in January. We met at my home for readings of work and birthday cake with candles.

Also the poetry reading group I run, the Golden Pear poetry reading group, was 5 in January. It has been cake all round!

In this month of the pearl, "helmikuu" in Finnish, the word for birthday is syntymapaiva, another wonderful mouthful, and one of the few words I can still remember because thereby hangs a tale which I may perhaps tell here one day....

BACK AGAIN?

2010-02-01T09:26:00.001-08:00

Can you believe it? More snow? Well, of course you can, it is still very early in the year, but I am wondering how many more times I'm going to have to sweep a path to the door...

And can you believe that if you do that and someone falls on your swept path you are liable? What about if I fall on my own swept path? What are we coming to? An accident used to be just that: an accident. Now it's a horrible process.

I have been busy lately trying to imagine a future in England where we don't have rain anymore and poet Juliet Wilson has kindly posted the results of one of my speculations on her poetry blog Bolts of Silk. Juliet has another blog, Crafty Green Poet, where all things to do with the environment are open to discussion. She also has a stunning and wonderful image of bare trees on it.

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

2010-01-27T05:09:00.001-08:00

There's something unnerving about Anthony Gormley's men strung out along Crosby beach.
When the tide's out they're comfortable companions that people thread in and out among in a kind of animate/inanimate interaction. They photograph each other beside the figures, look out to sea to discover what it is the figures are facing, cuddle them, even drape them with sweaters and jackets.

But when the tide comes sneaking in, creeping slowly up the figures' bodies until only their metal heads are visible it makes you begin to ask questions -

What do they mean? What are they looking at/for? Are they sad or sinister?

And what do we mean? What are we looking for/at?

CHEERING THINGS

2010-01-18T10:36:00.000-08:00

The snow has gone.

It's warmer.

There are snowdrop tips showing in my garden.

The forsythia is full of buds.

At half past five it was still just a little bit light outside.

There is a beautiful thin moon rising.

The great tits have been singing their spring song.

In my book of poems by Finnish poet Lauri Viita there is a poem that uses the letter K repeatedly: its first stanza is

Kaki kukkoja kukutti
kakatti kotikanoja.
Kukin kukkea kupunen
kukoi kuin kyky kekotti.
Kaikkokenkkaala kajasti.

Imagine trying to do that in English!

LAPAGERIA

2010-01-03T10:46:00.000-08:00

Seven years ago I bought a plant of this climber from an Alpine specialist in Slack Top near Heptonstall in Yorkshire. It is not an Alpine, of course; in fact it's the national flower of Chile and an extremely vigorous climber given the right conditions. But the nursery owners had a wonderful specimen then in their cold greenhouse along the side of their house and it was in wondrous and prolific bloom. They had managed to raise a few plants from seed and these were for sale. They were tiny and cost £6 each. I wanted one badly as I had tried to grow it myself from seed years ago, seed I bought from Chiltern Seeds in Cumbria. Only three of the seeds germinated but when I potted them on they withered and died. I know they need very special care, and don't like any kind of disturbance, in short they're difficult creatures, and I looked at these tiny plants and thought yes, no, yes, no, YES!!

I did my very best for it and it grew and is now in a very heavy, very large pot. It goes outside every summer and I struggle to bring it in every winter, then fall over it at regular intervals - there isn't really room here for such a big thing, and it has to have a big pot as it likes a good, deep root run (as well as a precise amount of moisture, peaty compost, good drainage, tolerable warmth, and no draughts).

So the third thing in my list of Great Wonders from 2009 is that it finally flowered! It had 6 fabulous, long, waxy bells of the clearest, deepest rose pink and oh my God I couldn't believe my luck. It was utterly, utterly gorgeous.

NEW YEAR

2010-01-02T05:49:00.000-08:00

And a very cheerful and eventful year to everyone out there!

Of all the things I did or witnessed in 2009 the two that contend for top position are: the afternoon when I sat watching flying ants, and the air above me suddenly filled with swifts, swallows and martins catching the ants as fast as they emerged - an incident I recorded on this blog in summer 2009.
The other amazing phenomenon that contends for top place among the wonderful is pictured on the right here:
in late October 2009, I noticed these on a tod of ivy - ladybirds transforming from larvae to fully grown insects. When I looked closer there were very many ladybirds on the ivy, some in more obvious ladybird form. I was thrilled to have seen this as in all my years of looking at wildlife I had never observed this before. This was the only image I managed to get as there was a wind blowing and each time I took a shot the leaves shook; all I got was blur. But this picture is clear and I'm pleased with it.

This is a year when I only made one resolution, which was to try to do less as I get very tired. Already it has been broken: I have a book coming out at the end of July, (The Plucking Shed, published by Cinnamon Press) and clearly I will have to do some readings after that date to promote it. But even before that I have readings booked in Manchester, York, Ludlow, and London. Plus on Sat April 10th I will be running a workshop in Much Wenlock as part of Wenlock Books' first ever Poetry Festival. I am a small but nonetheless important section of it: there will be readings from Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy and Roger McGough among many other events. I am also to contribute the poetry input to a weekend of songwriting at The Oak Barn in Shropshire in May, along with singers/ musicians Polly Bolton, Sue Harris and Gitika Partington.

What else will the year bring? I very much hope that for the world it will bring increased international co-operation in trying to solve the climate warming issue (Copenhagen was a huge disappointment but maybe the seeds are sown and greater things may yet come from it), and that peace will be restored to Afghanistan.

And for you, whoever you may be who read this insignificant little blog, I wish you an abundance of joy and delight in living. May all your surprises be happy ones!

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-19T14:04:00.001-08:00

A very happy Christmas to one and all!

And "God bless us everyone"...

(The Dickensian festival is still affecting my thinking!)
But if you ever feel like a taste of Dickens for the day, Grassington mounts this event on three Saturdays in December every year. And it is one of the most cheerful and pleasant events I've been to. The whole town came to life with laughter, light-heartedness, and rejoicing. And very brisk trading too at all the many stalls - good to see in a year that has been Doom and Gloom with recession, etc.

GRASSINGTON'S DICKENSIAN FAIR

2009-12-19T13:41:00.000-08:00

These "Dickensian" ladies were eager to have a go at the Tombola!

It was a very happy, crowded and jolly day, cold of course, but mulled wine and a hot roast pork sandwich soon warmed us up. And a hand-warming handful of roasted chestnuts, better than gloves any day.People had come to it from all over: a splendid Scot from Forfar in his equally splendid kilt; people from Wales and Liverpool and Sussex. They had all been before and loved it; I had only just come to hear of this annual event, but I too fell in love with it, returning home with, among other things, a treasured pot of homemade marmalade, truly the best I've ever spread on my toast.
There were brass bands, jugglers, and barrel organs, Mummery and Jiggery, acapella carol singing, and towards twilight a procession with a young Mary and Joseph, and the donkey, led round the town by the Town Crier, knocking at the pub doors and three times refused, before they were offered "a shed round the back".
They were followed by a crowd bearing burning torches and if after that cheering sight you were still cold, well, there were always the braziers depicted above for a
quick blast of heat!

TRAINS AND TIGGERS

2009-12-10T01:48:00.000-08:00

My car has hit the dust recently so I am using trains. On Saturday I'm going to Todmorden for a celebratory Christmas reading in the library, with mince pies and wine. I'll be reading with poets Janet Loverseed, Gina Shaw and Joy Howard. It doesn't seem a simple thing to get to Todmorden from where I live so it's going to be an interesting experience....The reading will be short, fifteen minutes or so, but the day will be long!

I went to Grassington's Dickensian Fair last weekend, had to take a series of three trains, and the most charming was the Ilkley train, extremely clean, with a beautifully modulated recorded message saying "Welcome to the Ilkley Train" and some very polite passengers who all apologised profusely if they elbowed you accidentally and who all, I noticed, dutifully placed their used tickets and any other rubbish in the station bin when they got off the train. The worst trains I've ever travelled on have to be Merseyrail trains; I don't like "Liverpool bashing" but these are shabby, badly battered by the humans they transport, and at certain times of day travelling on your own doesn't feel too safe. And as for bins? You just use the seats and the floor...much like the London Underground really.

In Grassington I met the Festival Director Amelia Vivyan. She described how working with her team was like working with a gathering of Tiggers! All keen, all "yes, yes, we can do that!" or "Wow, let's do this!" Bounce, bounce. How I like that! We shared a few names of people whom we thought to have flair and charisma at these events, and some who don't....

What would the world be like if it were populated by Tiggers? A bit like trains, I imagine, loud, jostling, chaotic - but full of adventure. Adventure? YES! Adventure. Bounce, bounce. I like that!

Here's to readings, and trains.

WRITING YOUR SELF

2009-11-21T05:25:00.000-08:00

I have just received a copy of the new book by Myra Schneider and John Killick "Writing Your Self" (published by Continuum International), a fascinating book in which several well-known writers consider and illustrate how writing has helped them make sense of traumatic periods of their lives, or great loss, sorrow, difficulty, or occasionally the simple joy of a love affair that others don't necessarily condone.
It is full of examples, and has a valuable section towards the third part of the book on how to begin, and how to explore the minefield of our inner selves.

I myself have three poems in it, two that illustrate the shock and the frustrations of serious illness (I was diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer in 2000) and one that illustrates how an ordinary object - scissors - can be a hook on which to hang a poem that explores issues of reality and absence.

I am very pleased to have poems in it, but even more pleased to have a copy of the book. I have only begun to dip in to the chapters, and so far have been very absorbed in what I have read. I will make time later for a much closer read but what the book has recalled for me, in the selection of my 2 poems on illness, is that terrible and abrupt passage from being a well person to a sick person.

It was December 2000; I had not been feeling too well for some time, three years in fact, and had gone back and forth to the doctor's surgery with inconclusive symptoms; no-one picked up that I might be at risk of ovarian cancer, even though my mother had died of it (and her sisters too though this was not in my medical records I believe). In 2000 I had taken up bell-ringing, which I loved, at Eccleston church, just outside Chester. The ringing chamber was approached up a steep flight of spiral stairs, something like 52 steps, though I cannot now remember exactly. Everyone entered the ringing chamber gasping for breath: I do remember that!

So for some time it never occurred to me that there was anything abnormal in my being especially out of breath each time I climbed those steps. Until I began to notice that my abdomen was somewhat swollen; at first I thought I was probably eating too much and needed to lose weight but very rapidly even walking on the flat became such a labour I realised something must be amiss.

My friends were more concerned than I was and under their coercion I went to evening surgery, anxious to be seen, and was. I was given a letter to go to the hospital next morning for an ultrasound scan. Still totally unsuspecting I was planning to drive myself but fortunately a friend insisted on taking me.

It was December the 21st, shortest day of the year, and my father's birthday. I had sent him flowers and of course wanted to hear from him to know they had been received safely. I also, as ever, was behind with writing Christmas cards and wanted to get back from the hospital to finish that task.

I didn't come back from the hospital.

An ultrasound scan was performed; it showed considerable presence of ovarian cancer tumours all through the abdomen,and I was hastily taken to a side ward and admitted there and then.

When I protested I was told that I was "very, very ill".

The impact of shock of course is that you absolutely can't believe what you're told. "No thanks!" I declared as a wheelchair was brought to take me down for further radiology. "I'm perfectly alright - I don't need that. I'll walk!"

Which I did. That was a long time ago. I have been through a lot since then. My father did receive the flowers. Also the shock of knowing his daughter had the same illness as his late wife.

The poem I wrote - "Diagnosis" - still brings all that back so clearly. The utter blankness of shock. It is in my collection "Uncertain Days" (Happenstance Press) and it will appear in my new, full collection "The Plucking Shed" which is due out next year from Cinnamon Press.

I am very, very lucky to be here still to anticipate a new collection. But I am. And I am so grateful.

As I read "Writing Your Self" I shall be asking myself was it the ability to write that helped save me?

HERON

2009-11-08T10:43:00.000-08:00

Just realised I too am one of those poets who has added to the ever growing list of poems about the heron (and a few on kingfishers too!). Here's one that was originally published on Nth Position's website:

Heron

Iconic bird, along with kingfisher, swallow,
owl, the lark, the lapwing,
every poet writes of you.They say you're
'hunched by the water,
deep in contemplation,
you raise the extending ladder of your neck,
walk on the talll stilts of your legs'.
Etc, etc.

Enough of all that stuff! You're nothing but
a sword, a spear, lethal harpoon.
As God, or whoever it was, decided
in his wisdom, or whatever it was,
to make you.

(published Nth Position, Dec 2008)

Clearly mine is a half-serious poem. The most beautiful poem I know about the heron is this by the American poet Mary Oliver: "Some Herons" , from her collection Wild Geese, (Bloodaxe). Well worth seeking out if you like herons.

Kingfishers on the River Dee

2009-11-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

I was walking with a friend along this stretch of the River Dee just below Farndon when, as I was trying to photograph this tree's reflection in the water, a kingfisher went winging swiftly past. I didn't get it in the picture however; kingfishers are too quick! In fact, despite its striking brilliance of blue and orange it's often by its speedy flight or rapid movement that I pick it out before I register the colour.

I walk regularly in a local nature park, Caldy Valley, and for some time in one recent winter a kingfisher was haunting the small stream there; I had a number of sightings of it. Then it vanished for months. They have very short lives, apparently, so perhaps this one had died. But yesterday I was walking there and had the great luck to see a pair of them, perched on a low branch over the water. I could just make out the narrow stripe of blue down their backs in the gloom beneath the overhanging hawthorns and willows and then they were gone.

I see bullfinches in this park too, and was very pleased to read in Birds magazine that their numbers are recovering somewhat: the bullfinch is now on the amber list, not the red list, of endangered species. When I was a child they were a common sight - gardeners and fruit growers used to be enraged to see them in the orchards or soft fruit beds. How different now: it's a serious and horribly sobering thought that they need protection. As does so much of our wildlife.

I often come across herons too, one stepping out right in front of me as it crossed from one tract of water to another. It's astonishing if you look down lists of titles of poems how many poems there are to the kingfisher and the heron.

The Earth Hums in B Flat

2009-11-01T09:34:00.001-08:00

Chester's recent Literature Festival had a series of lunch time spots featuring the work of new writers. I went to hear Mari Strachan speak of her novel The Earth Hums in B Flat, was captivated by what she had to say, bought the book and stayed up half that night reading it.

It's the tender story of young Gwennie, kind, imaginative, dreamy and as yet innocent. She lives in a small Welsh village where everyone knows everyone else's secrets but nobody talks of them. Her best friend Alwenna in particular knows more secrets than anyone else, secrets Gwennie, being more naive, is often slow to find out. But as the novel unfolds, Gwennie learns something of the danger of secrets and finds herself at last in possession of the most horrifying secret of all, one she can never share.

The story is framed round Gwennie's belief that she can fly, and at night in her dreams she does. And in one of these dreamed night-time flights over her village she sees a body floating in the "Baptism pool". Whose this body is and how it got there is revealed by degrees, very subtly and very cleverly. The uncovering of the true facts of this death - for what Gwennie has seen is a real body - parallels the process of Gwennie's growing up and experiencing the unpalatable side of human life.
From the very beginning of the story we are set in time and place very accurately - Gwennie's mother, who longs for a better house with "a proper kitchen and a bathroom", comforts herself with Evening of Paris scent and a blue satin dressing gown. Meanwhile she endures a house with a miserable open wood fire, and a scullery with a dripping tap and mice.
Gwennie is sent by her mother to look after the children of Mrs Evans so that Mrs Evans can go to Price the Dentist who will be in the village that day. But when Gwennie, who has dawdled, arrives she thinks Mrs Evans has already seen Price the Dentist because there is blood everywhere, and although there is a poker is lying on the floor, crockery is broken, and a sticky mess on the floor it never occurs to Gwennie that anything more sinister has happened there. What has actually happened is something we discover much later in the novel, and it's the how it happened that horrifies both us as readers and Gwennie.
I'm not going to disclose the ending here as that might prevent you reading the novel for yourself, something I urge you to do: I thoroughly enjoyed this story, for its cleverly managed storyline, I adored the character of Gwennie, who has that rare courage and audacity that perhaps only the really good and innocent possess and I loved its clear picturing of a small, closely-knit Welsh village in the 1950's, a portrait not unlike Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood". And every bit as lyrical.
A fine, fine novel and an excellent read.

The Glory of Trees

2009-10-18T09:57:00.001-07:00

Autumn is such a beautiful season. I love it!

Red and Yellow

2009-10-15T02:28:00.000-07:00

Went into the main Post Office recently and wasn't sure whether I was in the supermarket queue for the deli-counter or an airport. Most of the shelves for goods on sale had gone and there were groups of "love seats" - back to back spirals of seating - to either side of the doorway. In the centre of all this, a machine which issued tickets to notify you of your place in the queue for service. Hmm...

I have also been noticing that postmen, even on colder days, are wearing shorts. Is this simply a macho trend or is the P.O. too poor to afford the cloth for full-length trousers? No wonder we're heading towards a postal strike. Well, at least post-boxes and postal vans are still red.

Meanwhile everywhere you go in my city you are having to skirt round barriers and huge holes down which are yellow-coated gas engineers uncoiling great lengths of yellow plastic pipe.

And blithely uncaring of all this the yellowed autumn leaves are drifting cheerfully down and I'm busy scuffing my feet in them!

Havant and Ilkley

2009-10-06T07:43:00.000-07:00

In the recent month I have had two very happy successes: first prize in the Havant Literary Festival poetry competition, and a Commended in the Ilkley Literary Festival.
The Havant was judged by Anne Stewart who herself was a recent winner of the Bridport, and the Ilkley was judged by Ian Duhig. In both cases I managed, by the kind aid of good friends, to get to the awards ceremony. At Havant we were all surprised to find that we would not be expected to read our winning poems. We just hopped up onto the podium when our names were called, were given our cheques, and off we went.
On the other hand at Ilkley we were thoroughly rehearsed beforehand both in reading our poems and in the running order.Poor Ian had to go a couple of times through his long and thorough judge's report until he was probably wishing he'd never written it! But it went well, with quite a decent sized audience present to hear the poems. Afterwards there were readings from Ian Duhig and Debjani Chatterjee, and sadly I couldn't stay for them: a long drive home, and as our own Literature Festival in Chester begins this week I have a lot to do and could not afford a late night.

And, you know, I felt absolutely terrible: I have never wanted to be one of those poets who come to a reading, get up to read their own stuff and then promptly leave without listening to others. But on this occasion I had to do this. And still two days later I cannot forgive myself for this discourteousy ....
But if you are a reader of this blog, then please understand I very rarely behave like this!

Ilkley Festival will be posting the winning poems on their festival website eventually. So you can have a look there soon if you would like to see the poem/poems in question; Havant, I believe, might do that though no-one is sure...But Havant is only in its second year of running a festival and there is a lot to learn about these matters. I was very amused, and also impressed, to hear them say in their opening speeches that "Havant comes before Hay-on-Wye in the alphabet..." So look out, Hay-on Wye, you have a contender for your accustomed literary eminence ! I have a lot of respect for bravado like this because without bravado nothing gets achieved. And who knows...?

CHESTER OYEZ ! or What's in a name?

2009-09-19T04:49:00.000-07:00

October is approaching fast, month of the Chester Literature Festival, which this year has plenty to offer all ages and tastes.
Last year, 2008, a new section was addded, Chester Oyez!, which embraces all aspects of performance work from poetry to storytelling.I have been the Artistic Director for it since 2008. In its first year it succeeded in bringing over a thousand people in to Chester for the weekend and I hope this year, now that people are more familiar with it, there will be even more visitors. Its remit is to involve everyone, from 0-100! We offer participatory events: writing workshops - flash fiction, personal history, poetry, plays; activities - making poem cards, circus skills workshops combined with a look at poetry, writng workshops for children. There are storytelling sessions for children and for adults, performances of drama and the creation of drama; and cabaret performances of poetry and story telling.It's all wonderful fun and most events are free! Pick up a festival brochure from local Cheshire libraries or the Information Centre, The Forum, Chester, or have a look online at Chester Festivals website.

When it was first decided to include this section the greatest difiiculty was not in booking performers, but naming it! Chester is thought of chiefly as a Roman garrison town but has a vast history going back to mediaeval times. We have so much here: beautiful ancient city walls, a very old racecourse, The Roodee, sometimes known as the soup bowl because it's almost perfectly circular, a Roman amphitheatre, tiered rows of shops and a good number of genuinely old black and white buildings (some of our black and white are Victorian recreations). Every 4 years we have a stunning production of the mediaeval Mystery Plays. We have a wonderful riverside area called The Groves, where you can stroll, take a boat, listen to a brass band, or just sit and watch the world go by. Lime trees are the key tree of Chester and when they are in flower the air is heavy with their fragrance, soemthing I love. We also have extensive river meadows connecting Chester to the Welsh Marches route for those who love walking. It's a beautiful city.

So what to call this new element of the festival that would reflect some of this, a name that had cachet, was short, but memorable? The first thing I did was to check through all the other festival websites I could find to see what other people had chosen, wanting to make sure not to repeat anything.I had a few sleepless nights going through phrase after phrase, from "Ecce Scritori" to "Stand and Deliver" (performance work, you see!) Nothing felt or sounded right, until I thought of our Town Crier who stands each day at the Cross and whose powerful voice lets people know what's going on in Chester. In fact we have 2 Town Criers, a husband and wife team (you can't have enough of a Good Thing!). So finally, with the permission of our Town Criers, we settled on Chester Oyez! What Pop Larkin (remember the Darling Buds of May?) would call perfick!
And Chester Oyez! is not just perfick; it offers two whole Saturdays, the 10th and 17th of October, of joyful magic in a plethora of events. Come and join us and share in it!

Great Spotted Woodpecker, PS.

2009-09-09T01:39:00.000-07:00

An afterthought as I found this photo of a single camellia in my files: it just captures the wonderful glowing red, almost rich deep pink, on the woodpecker as seen this morning.
Some things are so beautiful you can't move for a while after witnessing them: I am reminded at this moment of lines etched in a slate at Ty Newydd, how in reading a poem a line
"burns into your mind, you close the page, unable to go on".

I feel like that but the day is waiting....

Great Spotted Woodpecker

2009-09-09T01:17:00.001-07:00

Just the sort of place you'd expect to see the great spotted woodpecker but the one I saw was on the golden robinia in my neighbour's garden, early this morning. The sun was full on the bird but all I could see among the deep gold leaves of the robinia was the flash of ruby-red from under the bird's tail. I could hear it, however, hammering hard at something, clearly something very resistant and solid as it was a sharp, clear sound with no resonance. Robinia trunks are rarely a source of insects, they're so solid, so the bird had to be breaking something specific. After a while it shinned up the trunk in that bunch-and-let-go/ bunch-and-let-go way it has and I saw it had a hazel nut in its beak! It tried another crevice but clearly thought that no good so down it shinned again. It is a wonderful thing to watch a bird "abseiling" downwards - same movement as in going up, just a reverse direction. But so fast!
The colour of all this was brilliant, pure stained glass with sunlight pouring through:the deepening gold of the robinia leaves lit by sun, the glow of the bird's red, and the richly marked black and soft white of its wings neck and tail were as strong as I have ever seen them. The red was intense camellia. A joyful first moment of the day for sure!

Holes and Roots

2009-08-23T06:49:00.000-07:00

The holes of this blog are on account of the gasmen who have been laying new plastic pipes in our road, after digging huge craters at the edge of all our narrow driveways. Or at least they were doing so until last Friday when they downed tools and suddenly left, leaving us with the gaping holes and very few places to park since our road is narrow in any case. Needless to say we all complained bitterly to the company responsible for the digging and this week a new gang came and worked with a vengeance, thoroughly blocking the road with digging machines, vans, and trailers carrying great coils of brilliant yellow pipes. But thank God it's nearly done; it only needs to have tarmac laid to cover up the gouges in the terrain and then the road will be at peace again.

Which is good because this road is an ancient laneway which was used in years gone by for walking and leisurely strolling, and still has that atmosphere about it: at weekends people walk their dogs down the road on their way to a local nature park, people cycle down it heading for the same place, and others jog through it. It's quite normal to see people walking idly in the middle of the road not bothering to use the pavements. I do it myself! It is one of the reasons why I came to live here, the way it feels so settled and still tightly linked to a vanished past. Once the area was a fruit farm, and there are still damson trees, apples, plums in some of the hedgerows and also in the nature park I mentioned. I have just been for a walk with my small dog, and stopped to fill a bag with damsons to cook for supper!

This is probably why I'm so attached to Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre for Wales, (if I feel I must go an a writing course or retreat it's here I make for). It too has a deep sense of anchorage, first because it was the home of the great politician Lloyd george, and his presence lingers on - I don't mean in the form of haunting but in the knowledge that you can sleep in what was his room, you gather for readings and sharing work in progress in the library, the room where he died - and secondly because the staff rarely change so it's like catching up with friends each time you go.

And from some of the Welsh writers I have met at Ty Newydd I have learned how important their roots and connections with family and birthplace are. Their deep sense of connection with place and people makes me feel like a tumbleweed that has bowled through life with no real place of belonging. It doesn't bother me, as life has been full of rich experience. But theirs is so other to my own experience and has a great richness of its own.

So from holes to roots, and in a way the yellow plastic pipe being laid beneath our road and houses are another form of root, connecting each of us not only to a gas supply but in a strange way to each other by a rooted network of piping.

2009-07-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favourite places, The Oak Barn, in Shropshire, and this is where I will be this week as I am going to be the guest poet at a special concert given by Ludlow's "Larks" Community choir. I am really pleased to be asked back - I read here last year. But this year I am especially delighted to be doing this because they are going to sing one of my poems that has been set to music by Polly Bolton. This will be the second time this year I'll have had the pleasure of hearing one of my poems sung and, believe me, it is a truly uplifting experience. It transforms your poem not only into wonderful sound, but new meaning. The first time it happened for me, I was very close to tears, joyful, wonderful tears.

The poem I am going to hear sung is:

Lark

It pauses, then with a push of wings,
swims upward through the air,
all the time singing,
scattering notes like bright pennies,
bold in the copper sky.

Soon the lifting silhouette is gone.
All you can see now is the song.

This is the version of the poem that appeared in my pamphlet Uncertain Days, published by Happenstance Press. I hope next time I read it in public I'm not going to be expected to sing it...

And how apt that it is being sung by a choir called Larks!

Battle of the Skies

2009-07-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

On a warm Sunday afternoon recently I was sitting quietly in my garden doing nothing in particular, when I began to notice, on my right, some insects flying up from somewhere near the ground. They flew up at intermittent intervals, five or six of them at a time, but frequently enough to make me realise something special was happening.

Just as I stood up to go and look more closely, the air above my head was suddenly dark with what felt like every swift, swallow and housemartin in the area, swooping and diving so rapidly through the long narrow space of my garden that I could feel the rush of displaced air.

The insects were flying ants, and they were a real bonanza for all these hirondines: I sat down to watch and as the ants flew up, the birds would arrow in so fast and snatch them, turning back to fly through again. It was like watching a dog-fight from some film of World War Two. The sound of wings, the blacking out of the air space above my head, and every now and then I heard the tiny Snick! as beak met ant. It was amazing.

One of those moments that only come on rare occasions, a treasured moment of insight into how wild things live. Or don't, in the case of the ants...

Success is Inspirational

2009-06-28T02:57:00.000-07:00

Not my own success in this case but a friend's, Jan Bengree, (whose blog, jan's writing journal, you can read). Jan has recently had a run of success with flash fiction and short stories - second Prize in the Keele University short story competition and several short pieces published in Flash magazine (published by Chester University); success she shared at Words and Biscuits, our writing group of 10 women, who meet every 6 weeks. Jan is a very, very good writer but somehow for years she did not seem to do much, but suddenly she has the bit between her teeth and is at full gallop. And it's great to see!

Not only great to see but inspirational too: I went home after the group meeting and felt really keen to try some flash fiction writing myself so have spent a happy weekend spewing out short pieces. Three seemed really promising and I have sent these off to Flash magazine. Mslexia magazine also regularly features readers' flash fiction but their word limit is 150 words, extremely short - Flash magazine's word limit is 360, a bit more generous!

Words and Biscuits has had an interesting history. It was founded by Jan in the year 2000, and has only seen two people leave and two new faces arrive, and then only because these 2 former members moved away from the area. So we have been pretty constant. We are a mixture of poets and prose writers; some of us write in both forms. We used to broadcast our work twice a year on BBC Radio Merseyside, on the Artwaves programme, and were recorded by Angela Heslop who is very dear to all our hearts, such a relaxed, lovely person. But the programme got axed in favour of sport - totally disgraceful! as Artwaves was a really good and enjoyable programme, which presented details and snippets of art happenings all round our region and kept us in touch with what was going on. One of the few Radio M programmes I used to listen to regularly whether Words and Biscuits were on it or not.

Anyway, a cheerful goodbye to our past in the media! And on to other things: one of our members, Dilys Dowswell, is an active WI member also and she has organised for us to read our work to various WI groups round Cheshire. So we now troop around the county to some of the loveliest villages and read our work to groups that vary between tiny numbers and huge hallfuls of members. We get given wonderful tea and cakes, and we join in the singing of 'Jerusalem' with great gusto. I've never experienced anything quite like it in my life, and I tell you it's been a revelation and a joy. I never thought I would like this but to my surprise I do. Not just the tea and cakes but the obscure places we get to, the variety of village halls or other meeting places, the passionate causes championed by the different groups - yes, the WI is a great campaigning body for rural issues and is currently taking up the matter of the dearth of the honey bee, which I'm delighted about. (But that subject is for another blog post , when I get round to it...) I am beginning to have a great deal of admiration for the WI. They are remarkable women.

And you find out that some villages have Poems and Pints session which you don't know about, and other have 'Poems and Pies' lunches. These forays into Cheshire could almost take the place of Artwaves....

Midsummer

2009-06-22T02:42:00.000-07:00

And where are those long, long beautiful June evenings? Nowhere to be seen up here.

Despite that a pot of runner beans trained up bamboo canes is doing well in my small garden. How tough Mother Nature is - I'd have curled my toes up in this too cool summer weather!

The potatoes-in-the-compost-bag thing are not showing any signs of life yet but I didn't plant them until late; I had a spell of feeling very tired.

And there are only five apples on my apple tree this year.

I might try some rocket in a large pot but if I don't get round to that THEN
it's up to the runner beans...!

Zest!

2009-06-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

If you are near Chester on June 29th and have a free evening let me invite you to drop into Alexanders Jazztheatre Bar in Rufus Court (off Northgate St) at 8 pm and join me for an Open Mic Poetry Evening called ZEST! I shall be hosting it and almost everyone who wishes to gets a chance to read at least one poem. Even if you don't want to read you will have a very enjoyable time listening to a wide variety of work, including poems from our guest poet Alicia Stubbersfield.

We try to have a special guest at our Zest! evenings at least twice a year: in the past we have had Pat Borthwick, Chris Kinsey (BBC Wildife Magazine's poet of the year 2008), Matt Merritt, John Lindley, Andrew Rudd, Mandy Pannett, Maggie Norton and David Bateman.

When I say 'we' I mean the Zest! team who are myself together with Leih Steggall and Caroline Hawkridge.

Dream Songs

2009-06-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

"I am going to give you all some dream songs" said Michael Symmons Roberts early on in last Saturday's Poetry School workshop on writing the poetry sequence.

How wonderful! Everyone should have a dream song; dream songs should be lying on every surface of the house: the fridgetop, the kitchen counter (preferably beside the kettle), on your bedside table, and definitely in the bathroom.

But of course Michael was talking about the American poet John Berryman's great work, a huge sequence called "Dream Songs", written largely when Berryman was in hospital for a long period being treated for depression. And the poet was delighted because in this situation the work came to him and he got it down. Which made me think about the creative act and depression:

Caroline Smailes whose blog I read from time to time has been very candid in a recent post about her own fight with depression some years ago, and this is a young woman who is a very dedicated, enthusiastic writer. I'm not going to go into great lists here of writers who have struggled with serious depression through their lives; anyone can find any amount of examples.

But sometimes illness can trigger creative expression. I am thinking of the poet Molly Holden who was diagnosed with MS, and who wrote some of her most moving poems in the voice of someone shut in behind a window, looking out at a world that was calmly going on without her and which she was no longer able to get out into without help.

A diagnosis of MS is particularly numbing since there is so little that can be done for it. My own husband had MS and when he came out of hospital after receiving that diagnosis, following a crisis that left him paralysed and unable to speak, he recovered enough to throw himself into a fury of doing things, worked very long hours in the lab, and insisted on cutting down a half rotten tree in our garden, a sycamore standing on a slope. I will never forget the manic rage with which he set himself to that task, attacking only the trunk and refusing to do the sensible thing of first removing branches. There was no restraining him and perhaps he needed to express his own helpless despair and anger at being told he had MS, but I can only tell you that when that tree gave way and began slowly to topple down the slope, away from my husband, I have never felt so thankful in my life! It fell against another tree which stood firm.

He was not able to keep this impassioned activity up for long: the disease in his case was quite progressive and he rapidly reached the stage of incontinence, numbness in the hands, problems with speech, his memory shot to pieces, unable even to recognise close members of his own family. He died at the age of 47.

Maybe if he had been a poet he would have written his own dream songs. Instead I have written them for him.

Here's one:

For Finbar

The stars here are like apples
crowding the tree.
You could have picked them one by one,
kept them in the pocket
closest to your heart.

But it is I who watch the stars,
I who cannot name them as you did.
The pockets of my heart are filled
with holes, the bright apples
always out of reach.

This poem was originally published in Poetry Scotland, and later in my pamphlet "Uncertain Days" (Happenstance Press)

Nantwich

2009-05-04T05:45:00.000-07:00

Nantwich is one of the loveliest Cheshire towns, and is genuinely old black and white timbered buildings since it suffered a major fire and was rebuilt largely through the generosity of Queen Elisabeth 1st. Its black and white buildings are worth going to see for themselves alone, especially the bookshop which has settled in towards its middle so severely it looks like it has a bad case of rickets. Knock-kneed and yet very beautiful! There are many things worth seeing in Nantwich but I go there for two things particularly: one is this wonderful furniture shop that looks like an amazing ship that has sailed up the River Weaver by mistake and been stranded in the town.
The other is the very special Harry Clarke window in the church. The Clarke family were a Dublin firm of stained glass makers; much of their work is in churches and convents in Ireland but this window was done for a family that Harry knew very well and it is as if he pulled out all the stops when making it: the colours in it are the richest example of art nouveau stained glass I have ever seen and if you can get to Nantwich in late February or March, around midday so that you might be lucky enough to get the low winter sun pouring in behind the window, you will be dazzled by the intensity and sheer beauty of colour. I have tried to photograph it, but you would need special lighting to convey the stunning colours in it, and the postcard sold by the church shop sadly comes nowhere near the mark.
I was once fortunate to see it in perfect light conditions; I was with a friend and just as we arrived in Nantwich the sun came out. We looked at each other and said "Quick, let's go and see the Harry Clarke window!" and we got there at the precise moment that the sun lit it up fully: glowing greens, purples and blues as in peacock feathers, a thrilling brilliant rose pink and the bright willow green of new leaves in spring, and golds and yellows and fierce oranges. Harry used a great many metals in obtaining his rich colours and so it is no surprise perhaps to learn that he died quite young, at 42, of lung problems. This is the only window in this country as far as I know that he personally supervised the installation of.

2009-04-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

It's spring and this picture makes me long to start growing things. I think vegetables and fruit are among the most beautiful and colourful things of our world and this picture is full of colour! I love fruit and veg markets in other countries; huge piles of glorious knobbly tomatoes, shiny onions, exquisite furry-feeling fragrant peaches, oranges that still smell fresh from the tree (oranges in our supermarkets, indeed vegetables and fruit in general in our supermarkets, have very little smell which makes shopping a very dull experience).

My garden is very tiny, but even so I have runner-beans in a large tub, trained up bamboo canes; I have a patch of excellently sweet rhubarb; a Crispin apple tree that generously fruits every year even though it too is small as yet; and I'll be growing salad rocket in pots. On my window-sill are some potato tubers chitting up, and I am going to try growing these in bin bags full of compost. You start them off in a small layer of rich comppost, in a bag with its sides rolled down like sagging socks, and you add more compost and roll the bag up a little more as the plants begin to grow. I am told you can produce quite an amount of potatoes this way. We'll see!
In past years I grew the beans up the fences, muddled in with the roses and summer jasmines, but they never did very well that way so let's hope they do better in their tub. I might try some baby beetroot in the borders in with the flowers, but the soil is very sandy here and dries out very fast; root vegetables aren't too keen on that. Radish maybe? Except I'm not too keen on radish. Probably I should be preparing for climate warming by planting drought-loving flowers, or cacti or something: maybe I could try star apples; they grew on reasonably small trees in Malaysia, or papayas which grow straight and tall, perfect for that 'vertical' element in the garden. Although after last winter's bitterly cold weeks perhaps not. Or not yet at any rate...

2009-04-21T02:11:00.000-07:00

I have just come back from a Writers' Retreat at Ty Newydd, the National Writing Centre for Wales. This is a place every writer should spend time at: it has a really special atmosphere, very conducive to writing; it is run by some truly good people, who are so friendly, kind, and generous, and it says much for the place itself that most of them have been here a long time; they love to work here. That in itself is a sign of how welcoming Ty Newydd is. You are well looked after, well fed, and for those moments when you need to walk and think or just burst out into the air, there are wonderful scenic walks right on your doorstep: down to the beach at Criccieth or along the woodland path beside the river Dwyfor. If you are interested in wildlife - and I certainly am! - there is so much to see: dippers and goosander on the river; wood anemones, primrose, wood sorrel, dog violet and bluebells in the wood plus the cherries in blossom. In past years I have seen the pied flycatcher here, and the green and the greater spotted woodpecker. Plenty of goldcrests.
Down by the shore I look out for ringed plover, redshank, turnstone, oystercatchers and cormorants and this year I was delighted to see the first wheatear of the season.
The way to the shore leads between high banks of gorse, this year in prolific flower and the rich coconut smell of it was intoxicating. I saw my first swallow, a very fine fellow preening his glistening feathers and his forked tail as he perched on telephone wires. I had a good long look at him through binoculars, and admired his precisely defined colouring: once in Derbyshire I saw two swallows skittering about on a low roof and as the sun caught them I saw how intense the blue of their backs really is - for a brief moment it took on the sheen and brilliance of the kingfisher and was stunning.
But I love Ty Newydd for more then these reasons; there are two places I find I can really get work done, and this is one of them (the other is The Oak Barn in Shropshire - check out Oak Barn Workshops on the web). I love the feeling at Ty Newydd of welcome and warmth when you first step inside the door: it's quirky, with awkward and mysterious staircases, and amazing chimney stacks when seen from the back. It's an old house that belonged to Lloyd George towards the end of his life; he died in what is now the library. When I come here I often have what was his bedroom, a room I especially like, with two marvellous window seats looking out on the long front drive with its beeches and conifers and inviting bend that suggests magic beyond (and there is magic, for this is the way to the river and the woods!) There is nothing pretentious about the house, it's solid, sturdy and at the back it has the feeling of a house that has simply increased in size and adapted to changing needs of its own free will: a bit like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin it has 'growed itself', springing like a strange and affable white mushroom from the earth. And I think it's the word 'affable' that fits it best. You can come here and be yourself like the house, enjoy all that's around you, feel a real part of this wonderful place, and when you leave you take it with you in your heart. Along with several finely covered pages of promising writing, which is the best thing of all! If you haven't been yet and you are a writer, get the brochure and book a course. Or even better a retreat. There's nothing like Ty Newydd. There couldn't be. It's unique.

Post Script

2009-04-07T02:04:00.000-07:00

Just a codicil to Sunday's post: Yorkshire was far behind Cheshire in terms of spring flowers; we're in full daffodil glory here while Yorkshire was all hellebores and crocus. Perhaps after all there is a remarkable benefit in going to colder counties; it's a form of time travel, revisiting the season you've just lived through at an earlier stage. (Forget cryogenics; just keep travelling north and regain lost time! It must be the same principle...)

In a small Alpine garden and nursery at Slack Top near Heptonstall there were beautiful crocus in full bloom, along with daphnes, hellebores and an astonishing ruby coloured corydalis which I've never seen before. But I only have a pic of the crocus.

The Entangled Bank

2009-04-05T12:34:00.001-07:00

This has been a week of readings, one at the end of March in Hebden Bridge library, reading from the anthology "A Twist of Malice" ( a collection of 'uncomfortable' poems by older women, published by Grey Hen Press, edited by Joy Howard) in which I have 2 poems. Pamela Coren and Gina Shaw were my co-readers and we all had what I call '4 boiled egg' minutes, that is, 12. Hebden Bridge library has just been refurbished and the upper room where we were reading was light, spacious, and had beautiful exposed beams. It was cold in Yorkshire, minus 4 on Saturday night, with a light flurry of snow! Beyond the snow you could still make out the stars in the half-clouded sky - it could almost have been snowing stars, it was so glittery.

Then on Weds April 1st I and two friends set off for Shrewsbury to an event called The Entangled Bank, a celebration in poetry of Darwin. In this bicentenary year Shrewsbury has pulled out all the stops and is celebrating Darwin fulsomely. This was the grand finale of The Entangled Bank, (a quote from Darwin's own work which refers to the rich turmoil of living things in a thickly covered bank of plants). The project began in February with poems being displayed in the Park and Ride buses around Shrewsbury. 24 poems had been displayed, including one of mine called Oak, and that was the reason I was invited to Shrewsbury for this particular event. It was a wonderful evening, some excellent poems by members of the Anglo-Welsh Poetry Society, and all interspersed with readings from Darwin's own memoirs, including his deliberations on the pros and cons of marriage. It was like being fast-tracked through Darwin's life, brilliant! The three of us had a good time and were made very welcome. It really was a most enjoyable night.

The week came to a close with another reading , more local this time and with the group I belong to called Words and Biscuits. We are a mix of prose writers and poets and we used to broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside quite regularly but the programme we were recorded for got axed in favour of sport - sign of the times! So now we take our work to the world by visiting W.I groups in Cheshire and entertaining them with our stories and poems. (One of our group is a W.I member). It can be great fun sometimes; we go to some very tucked-away places, meet all kinds of people and occasionally, as on this night, get plied with huge slabs of home baked fruit cake!

But the week didn't quite come to a close with that: on Saturday night I went off to Theatr Clwyd yet again for another evening of dance; Scottish Dance Theatre this time, an energetic and exciting performance with quite acrobatic moves on the part of the dancers. And in the interval I was lucky enough to get another good look at the North Albanian photographs taken by Rhodri Jones; they had not yet been taken down. So, a thoroughly good week, all in all.

Paula Jennings

2009-03-30T02:39:00.000-07:00

I recently received "From the Body of the Green Girl", by Paula Jennings, a pamphlet of poems from Happenstance Press and I can't remember when I have ever enjoyed a pamphlet as much. The blurb on the back describes the poems as "rich, strange...of surreal imagination.. unconventional spirituality". They are certainly all of that, but more than that they filter into your mind, and haunt you with their freshness, their bold entry into other dimensions until you feel that you are living simultaneously in two different spaces, this tangible, visible world and an 'other', invisible world, the one we all try to imagine, the one beyond this; a world that Paula Jennings has no hesitation in visiting at will, and thereby bringing the reader into it. In "Elegy for Ben" she imagines Ben in that other world where animals 'converse with no words' and Ben

'inhabits
the language of lean muscle,
the narrow muzzle that translates complexities
of scent'

as if Ben has slid into the animal world in every sensual way while we 'are dull strangers' in a world 'where the foxes trust us with nothing'. Jennings has a remarkable abilty in her work to slip into the very skin of things and be something other than herself. In "Driving in Autumn" she enters a dream of abandoning daily stress and letting her animal archetype carry her; there is a 'flow of fur from road to verge' she 'brakes', 'unbuckles' herself into her animal and then they are travelling through 'stiff stars of cow parsley' observing black leaves against the moon, listening to the 'wing-beats of sycamore keys' until 'every weed in the ditch is breathing'. It is wonderful stuff, the transformation of self into something other, a journey both beyond and yet also vividly into our familar world. And it is this quality in the poems - of the thing that lies beyond or beneath, brought to life in vital and real, grounded terms, - that makes these poems so memorable. It becomes quite chilling in the poem sequence "Looking for God" where Jennings lists the vast canopy that makes up our planet and ends

'I give you dominion,
he says,
nudging it all towards me
with a polished boot'.

I found in those brief lines a perfect summary of why it's all gone so badly wrong for us; this God is more like some kind of Nazi figure, and his entrusting us with 'dominion' is like setting us a terrible test that he knows we will fail.`
The poem that most encapsulates Jennings' power for me was "The Day Before the Last One", an apocalyptic poem where the last things she is given are a tin mug and a left shoe by people whose 'eyes are empty but whose 'guns are full of purpose'. Her 'unreachable mind' sees the shoe filled with mountains, the mug filled with goat's milk.
And because I too am getting older I really enjoyed the poem that contains the title line of the pamphlet, "Autumn Equinox" where Jennings sees old age surfacing from the 'body of the green girl' and turning into the Cailleach or Crone, 'flapping her rags' shuffling through 'dry leaves', which turns into a very reassuring and uplifting poem when the Crone

'smiles my seasons into me, so implacable
and tender that I want to keep her.'

These are poems that smile their seasons into you and are themselves so implacable and tender that you want to keep them with you, always.

Ballet Rambert

2009-03-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

Last week I went to see Ballet Rambert at Theatr Clwyd, to watch three dance pieces: Eternal Light, The Carnival of the Animals, and Infinity. It was so good I went twice - I had a spare ticket for the Friday night which I had intended to change but instead I hung onto it!

I do not have the language of a ballet expert to communicate precisely what I saw but I want to try and describe my response to it.
Eternal Light was a requiem piece which focussed not on a life well lived but on the young: a requiem for them for the loss of our planet, and also for the loss of young lives in World War 2. It was influenced by Gericault's painting of The Raft of The Medusa, an extremely moving painting that depicts a group of men on a raft, in a triangular formation; they float towards a wide break of light in the sky, the hands of the men standing lifted towards it, and those sitting either kneeling up to look at it or comforting the prostrate dying. When the ballet opened the tight formation of the dancers and the beautiful synchrony of their movements reflected this scene intensely. During the section that dealt with war dead the poem 'In Flanders field the poppies grow' was sung and the stage backlit with crimson while, very slowly, lit crosses were lowered down, until they formed even military rows of memorial crosses. It was quite harrowing. Colours in this ballet were minimal: mainly white, with some green and red. Nothing else, which made it more poignant. Towards the end of the piece the dancers performed against a huge waxing moon whose light became so intense that the whole audience was lit by it, and the effect of it was so wonderful that you could clearly observe how emotional people felt. I honestly think I have never before sat in an audience who were so unanimously moved by a ballet, and it was an astonishing event. The music was specially composed for the ballet and it too was wonderfully moving. I was so, so glad I had a ticket for a second performance, and was equally moved on the second night.

I must be giving the impression that the other two pieces counted for nothing, and of course that is not the case at all. It's just very difficult to be so profoundly moved by a ballet and then have to try and shift gear to concentrate on something very different. What I would like to comment on in The Carnival of the Animals is the joyful verve with which it was danced, and the exquisite solo of the swan was a delight. 'Infinity' I found deeply sad and very powerful, with a strong element in it of the chorus from a Greek tragedy. And in fact on my second visit I couldn't bear to stay for it: I simply wanted to hug the vision of 'Eternal Light' tight to my chest.

During the intervals I spent my time looking at the exhibition of photographs, taken by Rhori Jones, of the mountain people of North Albania. Theatr Clwyd is a treat in that it uses its very long, wide corridors as art galleries, and I have been lucky to see some superb displays in these, including, some time ago, the vast, brilliantly coloured paintings of Welsh artist Mary Lloyd Jones whose work I very much admire. But back to the photographs! They were taken between 1992 - 1999, and were of a harsh, tough people whose lives were hard and rigidly governed by codes that swung between high Catholicism and pagan practice. The faces were thin, hard and careworn; clearly a very poverty-stricken life and very cut off both from each other and the rest of the world: mostly they travelled between villages by boat on the large mountain lakes. Blood feuds were common, and could last as long as fifty years until the oath of bessa was taken to end the feud. Tiny babies were still dressed in swaddling cloths. One of the pictures showed the funeral ritual for the poet Martin Camaj, a poet I had never come across before but have now looked him up and found some of his work, and was relieved to see that it very much echoed the quality of life as shown in these photographs; so there was nothing at all artificial about them. They were truly extraordinary shots.

It was a very rich night altogether, Eternal Light, and this exhibition as well. I had two thoroughly great evenings out! I can think of so many things I've been to that were eminently forgettable but this, I am sure, will stay with me for a very long time.

The Last of The Snowdrops

2009-03-15T08:53:00.001-07:00

This post is a tribute to the friend who took her own life.

Among Snowdrops

She did it in snowdrop season
when the future was shut off by snow,
when the earth was cramped, cold and barren,
her heart like a black frozen pond.

She did it in snowdrop season,
among those cold, icy blooms in the snow,
the green hearts within the white hidden,
her own heart as bitter as sloe.

And her blood there, staining the snowdrops,
like bright berries crushed against snow.
She lay there, so white among them,
her body all frozen and closed.

Still. Very still. Among snowdrops.
All broken, those bloodied white blossoms –
I cannot endure them now.

Published in The Frogmore Papers, No 71, Spring 2008.
And in The Stony Thursday Book

Hellebores

2009-03-12T03:03:00.000-07:00

They are strange flowers in some ways, opening their big moonlike discs that, in the case of the greenish ones, have a glow-in-the-dark quality to them, and lingering on for weeks until they're hard and dry like old paper. Now I can't remember where I saw it, or quote what it said, but I am sure Ted Hughes wrote a very unflattering poem about Hellebores, comparing their fat buds to slugs and generally not allowing the plant to have anything but a sinister, uncomfortable but fascinating ugliness. It isn't in his Collected Poems, so I must have seen it elsewhere. But where? It's driving me daft; I'd love to find it.

I feel similarly about snowdrops: sometimes I find them very beautiful, tough, brave, resilient; and other times sinister, eerie, like unwelcome night-lights. Their powers of multiplying themselves are quite astonishing: turn up a spadeful of them and there seem to be legions of maggot-shaped white bulbs on the blade. Un-nerving. I have written several poems about this, trying to get to the nitty-gritty of the effect they have on me. To compound this they are associated in my mind with a friend who committed suicide. I have written about that in a poem called Among Snowdrops which has been published in The Frogmore Papers, and also in Ireland in The Stony Thursday book.

Black Boxes

2009-03-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I went into Chester to Caroline Smailes' book signing at Waterstones. I got a copy of her novel Black Boxes and read it Saturday night. It's the story of a post-natally depressed woman who in the last hours of her life (she's swallowed the pills) is recounting her obsessive love for the anally retentive control freak Alex. Alex is not only a control freak, he's the son of one: his mother, Penny, is a virago who claims to be a feminist but for Ana, our dying heroine, Penny is the angel of death in disguise, taking decisions to 'help' the couple that are not born out of generosity or kindness.
The book is laid out in black boxes, all small, all framing Ana's memories and thoughts. It gives it the quality of a play, particularly as there are apparent 'stage directions' in brackets accompanying each box; add to that the Greek chorus effect of Ana's repeated wailings of how she loves Alex, how she must not sleep, must not blink etc and you might indeed think Smailes is practising to be a playwright. It seems a style suited to the 'light bite' age but this novel is anything but a light bite: it's bleak; the only colours used are red, black and white, underlining the starkness of the story.
The most harrowing section is Pip's diary: Pip is Alex's and Ana's daughter who struggles to cope while her mother lies on her bed, unkempt, unwashed and helpless as family life slides into chaos. Pip is saddled with a tragic younger brother who soils and wets himself regularly, and she herself is repeatedly abused sexually by a cruel school fellow who uses her and then sneers at her. She and her brother use sign language to communicate, while Alex and his mother speak in a code of reversal, emphasising Ana's extreme isolation. At times I got annoyed with the constant repetitions of Ana's wailings, and skipped a bit. But I couldn't skip Pip's diaries; these are where the novel has force and a dark power that is truly tremendous, and are impossible to put down.

This is not a story to recommend to anyone who's down in their boots! If you want to find out more about Caroline Smailes she has a blog: in search of adam.

Indeed if it were not for Caroline I would not be writing this blog: she ran a blogging workshop in Chester last year as part of the Literature Festival's events, and I am grateful to her for that and for the generous help she has given me as I've floundered into blogging.

Pour yourself a large brandy and read Black Boxes - If your own life is a tolerably good one, you'll value it even more after this!

The Hare

2009-03-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

On Sat Feb 28th, eve of the mad hare month, I and some friends were driving to Wigmore Abbey in Herefordshire where the a capella group The Polisumi Sisters were to'premiere' one of my poems in song at a concert in aid of the Red Cross. A hare ran across our path and crouched on the verge for a while and I thought of lines by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams: "moonlight silvering her closecropped fur" from a poem called "The Innocent Hare", only it was our headlights silvering the fur not the moon. But it was a beautiful moment, the kind of moment that brings a lump to the throat. Another lump rose in my throat when, later, I heard my poem "Sometimes" sung by the group and accompanied by the dulcimer; for a while I couldn't speak, the singing gave the poem an intense poignancy I wasn't prepared for. To hear your own work sung, as you sit in candle and firelight, under massive oak beams, with shadows dancing on the thick stone walls around you - well....how lucky! There is no doubt in my mind that the hare is indeed magical.

Little red boots

2009-02-17T04:54:00.000-08:00

The February snow has gone from most places now. My small granddaughter met snow for the first time and didn't like it one bit. We thought she might do what Kit Wright's poem says of Mary Lou in the poem 'Red Boots On', who in her red boots goes 'kicking up the winter till the winter's gone'. But no, she did not!
But someone must have because it feels like winter has almost gone: yesterday I saw so many crocuses in bud in nearby gardens, it seemed as if they had just popped up overnight; the sun was out and the birds were madly competing for air space. It was wonderful.
I was delighted by Emgee's poem left as a comment on my second posting here. A joyful surprise, and I love surprises (of the good kind - but then, who doesn't?). And a very fine poem too. Thank you, Emgee

A plus to everything

2009-02-11T05:52:00.000-08:00

And snowdrops are the big February Plus...

And the Finnish for February is helmikuu, which means 'month of the pearl'. It refers to frozen droplets of ice that melt and then refreeze, pearl to pearl.

February is an odd month

2009-02-10T07:33:00.000-08:00

Usually I look forward to February: it has Candlemas, one of my favourite festivals because I love light; it has Valentine's day , the day I got married on; it's a short month; and the days get longer - hoorah! But maybe it's the recent cold weather; somehow February lacks appeal this year....

Do not pass go

2009-02-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

It feels a bit like starting a race and not hearing the starting gun. So I'm still here at the beginning, haven't passed Go....
But I have got this far at least - Well done, red boots!

red botinki

and this is it!

Hawthornden

Permissions

Games

Home sweet home

CLOTHES, MAKE-UP, HAIR = WEDDINGS!!

William

Sometimes

Weeks of Perfume

Shoes to Die For?

Sentinelle Blog

A Splash of Happiness!

Scattering Notes like Bright Pennies

Review of The Plucking Shed

Mandy Coe

Brigid's day, goddess of Fire, Inspiration, and Healing

OWNING A DOG

AN AFTERNOON OF BIRDS

HARLECH IN THE RAIN

No Excuse?

YORKSHIRE

KIMONO

ECO POETRY IN LLANGOLLEN

A GREAT WEEKEND

SHROPSHIRE EVENT

JOYOUS NEWS!

ZEST!

IT'S TRULY SPRING, GOOD THINGS ARE HAPPENING

HERON

LATEST NEWS FROM RED BOTINKI

AND WHAT YOU FIND ELSEWHERE

WHAT YOU FIND IN THE GARDEN AFTER WINTER.

THE PLUCKING SHED

SNAKESKIN AND HAPPENSTANCE

FINISHING THE QUILT THREAD

GEORGE MACKAY BROWN

February, a good month.

POSTED

BIRTHDAYS!!

BACK AGAIN?

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

CHEERING THINGS

LAPAGERIA

NEW YEAR

Merry Christmas!

GRASSINGTON'S DICKENSIAN FAIR

TRAINS AND TIGGERS

WRITING YOUR SELF

HERON

Kingfishers on the River Dee

The Earth Hums in B Flat

The Glory of Trees

Red and Yellow

Havant and Ilkley

CHESTER OYEZ ! or What's in a name?

Great Spotted Woodpecker, PS.

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Holes and Roots

Battle of the Skies

Success is Inspirational

Midsummer

Zest!

Dream Songs

More Readings Etc

Nantwich

Post Script

The Entangled Bank

Paula Jennings

Ballet Rambert

The Last of The Snowdrops

Hellebores

Black Boxes

The Hare

Little red boots

A plus to everything

February is an odd month

Do not pass go