Wear The Fox Hat: poetic coincidences

Poet Matthew Stewart kindly pointed me in the direction of this post by poet Mat Riches, which talks a little about a couple of poems from my first chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, which came out through HappenStance back in 2005. As I explain in the comments, rather oddly one of the poems mentioned came to mind a day or so before I read Mat's post, even though I probably haven't read it or thought about it in 10 years.

But anyway, more to the point, have a good browse of Mat's blog, Wear The Fox Hat – it's full of good things.

Coming & Going: Poems for Journeys

This arrived in the post yesterday, the latest book from the wonderful HappenStance Press. Coming & Going is about exactly that – journeys of all sorts – and features work from over 100 HappenStance poets.

Once I've had time to read it, I'll post something much fuller on here, but at the moment it's just a delight to be reminded that I'm a HappenStance poet – my offering here is Cure, from my first chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light. It's an even greater delight to be reminded of the company that I'm in – James Wood, JO Morgan, DA Prince, Matthew Stewart, Michael Mackmin, Maria Taylor, Jon Stone, Chrissy Williams, Alison Brackenbury, Frances Corkey Thompson, Gill McEvoy, Andrew Philip, Kirsten Irving, Gerry Cambridge, Alan Buckley, Clare Best, Rob A Mackenzie, Gregory Leadbetter and Marilyn Ricci to name but a few. Oh, and not forgetting Helena Nelson, who IS HappenStance Press, a very fine poet, and an inspiration to boot.

It's £12, and you can buy it here.

TS Eliot Prize shortlist announced

The shortlist for this year's TS Eliot Prize has been announced – there are five debuts on the list, alongside the likes of Nick Laird and Sean O'Brien. It's good to see the judges including such a diverse range of work, although the list is dominated by the larger publishers, with a very notable exception – Fiona Moore's The Distal Point is published by the very wonderful HappenStance.

Aunt Margaret's Pudding by Alison Brackenbury

This arrived yesterday – Alison Brackenbury's new collection for HappenStance Press. Looking forward to getting stuck into it like I would any good dessert!

New at Sphinx

Sphinx, HappenStance Press's website that reviews pamphlets and chapbooks, as well as gathering together information about poetry pamphlet publishing, has some new reviews, including this one of Sally Evans' The Bees of Dunblane & The Song of the Walnut Tree.

There's a really substantial archive of older reviews, too – enjoy browsing through them (and of course, if it inspires you to buy a pamphlet or two, so much the better).

The Poet's Republic

The submissions window at The Poet's Republic is open until the end of September, with issue 4 due out in November. Nell Nelson of HappenStance Press is guest editor this issue, which pretty much sounds like a guarantee of high quality, and if you read the submissions guidelines you'll see that this Scottish mag is casting its net pretty far and wide stylistically and in terms of subject matter.

Making The Most Of The (New) Light

Over at his blog Rogue Strands, Matthew Stewart has very kindly linked to my recent interview in the Daily Telegraph, before talking about how it throws new light on some of the poems in my HappenStance chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, which came out in 2005.

When I was packing up ready to move house last autumn, I found two final copies of the chapbook, which is otherwise out of print. If anyone's interested in getting their hands on a copy, just drop me a line.

Pattern beyond chance, by Stephen Payne

Excellent review of an excellent collection – Stephen Payne's Pattern beyond chance (HappenStance) – by Matthew Stewart at his blog, Rogue Strands. As he says, it's pretty rare, I think, to find a poet who manages to harness poetry and science, rather than just adding a rather superficial scientific gloss to their work.

Happy birthday, HappenStance!

Just about exactly 10 years ago now, I was down in North Devon for the readings and prize-givings for the Plough Prize, in which I'd won the open category.

While there I met the judge, Helena Nelson, and she explained that she had just started a new chapbook press, HappenStance, from her home in Fife. She'd tested the water with a chapbook of her own 'Unsuitable Poems', and followed it up with Andrew Philip's wonderful Tonguefire (if you can find a copy of this anywhere, I recommend it very highly).

To my surprise, she asked me to send her every poem I had, with a view to publishing a pamphlet. At the time, I think I only had 30-35 that I thought of as finished in any way, but over the next few months, Nell and I worked away at them, and the end result was my chapbook Making The Most Of The Light, which was launched in Edinburgh in October 2005.

HappenStance is celebrating its 10th birthday this week, having moved on to publishing full collections by the likes of DA Prince as well as chapbooks, and even a quick look at their website will reveal the calibre of poets they've worked with over the last decade.

So, I just wanted to say a big Happy Birthday to it, and a huge thank-you to Nell for taking a chance on publishing my poetry. I'm proud, and above all very grateful, to have been associated with such a wonderful press.

NOTE: I do still have two copies of Making The Most Of The Light left - none of the poems in it have appeared in my subsequent collections. Email me if you're interested in receiving one.

Frances Corkey Thompson

A few years back, Frances Corkey Thompson brought out a superb chapbook - The Long Acre - with HappenStance Press. Among other highlights, it contained one of my favourite bird poems, Stonechat, a piece that manages to pack a huge amount into a few brief lines.

She now has a website/blog here, at which you can find out more about her writing, as well as contact her for feedback on your own writing.

The Anvil's Prayer, by James W Wood

Ward Wood Publishing, 2013, £8.99
Surprise in poetry, most readers would probably say, can only be a good thing. The surprise of new forms, of words used to create new sounds, new music, or the surprise of original and wholly distinctive subject matter.
There's another sort though, and that's the surprise achieved by all really good poetry, of making you feel that something's been said the only possible way it could be said. The surprise of an effect that's both emotional and intellectual, but that creeps up on you unannounced.
That's how James Wood's poetry works. His technical skill and ear for language are outstanding, but what repeatedly catches you off-guard in this memorable debut collection is the emotional heft that he asks them to carry.
I found that all the more impressive given that I'd seen the manuscript of the book well before publication, and have read and re-read the two chapbooks - The Theory of Everything (HappenStance, 2006) and Inextinguishable (Knucker Press, 2008) - that contribute to its contents.
(I should add, at this point, that another more surprise occurs to me, namely that it took this long for a publisher to offer a full collection).
The book is split into three sections, Hymn, Elegy, and Exaltation, but while that broadly deals with themes of praise, grief and mourning, and celebration, one of its strengths, I think, is that all those elements are present throughout.

Take the wonderful The Craws, from the middle section:

                                                     You were
no prizewinner, sportsman, or great thinker,


just a man like any other, and one
whose life asks us for little grieving.

It's bracingly clear-eyed and honest, and it manages to perfectly balance mourning with recollection of a life well-lived. There's no attempt by the poet to distance himself from difficult or uncomfortable subject matter - the understated precision of the language is trusted throughout to steer clear of the pitfall of sentimentality.
Catherine Wheel, dealing with a suicide, is another good example, asking its questions gracefully and without a hint of melodrama or straining for easy emotional effect.

                                           you were
a Catherine Wheel blazing brilliantly

in a ploughed field at midsummer, a spark
that might have cloaked us all in fire
if only we could have seen it.

We're talking about restraint, here (sometimes abetted by Wood's skilful use of the constraints of form), rather than the sort of buttoned-down politeness of which much mainstream British poetry is often accused. When Wood wants to, he can really put the spurs to the language and positively gallop across the page. A poem like The Theory Of Everything is exhilarating for the way it pulls together a whirlwind of diverse ideas and images to celebrate the sheer variousness of the world (no, the universe), while there's a similar joy in both language and life itself to be found in Fantaisie De Fruits and Buccaneers.
Wood's control of pacing is evident not just in individual poems, but in the structure of the collection, closing with the superb An Fraoch Mor and Departures, both perfectly controlled in their reflectiveness after some more free-ranging excursions just before. The latter is again clear-eyed, refusing to look for excuses or distractions, closing with "So set sail for life, / keep steel in your eyes. Hold hard to your course / and let the storm clouds rise."
The love poems are highlights too, and I'll close by pointing out one further surprise that involves them. I suspect many poets would have kept the opening piece here, The Same Page, towards the end of the book, a sort of pay-off after the difficult journeys that have gone before, what with its potential for a happy ending of sorts. Here, though, it's an interrogation of both the nature of love and of poetry, and the hold it takes on you isn't released until the end of this very fine book.

All change at Sphinx

Sphinx, Happenstance Press's online poetry pamphlet 'zine, has got a new look, and a new purpose in life, too, by the looks of it.

The pamphlet reviews have gone sadly, although there are certainly more journals and magazines reviewing them now than when Sphinx started, something for which it can claim some of the credit. It's now blossoming into a much more wide-ranging poetry pamphlet mag, including features, interviews, news and resources for poets and publishers alike. I recommend it highly.

Tasting Notes - a poetry film by Matthew Stewart

Matthew Stewart's wine-themed poetry chapbook, Tasting Notes, published by Happenstance, has been turned into a film - you can watch it here. It's a great way of presenting the poems, I think - perhaps it wouldn't work so well with a longer collection, but it suits a pamphlet down to the ground.

An interview with Gill McEvoy, part 2

Chester poet Gill McEvoy has published two (now sold out) pamphlets with HappenStance, Uncertain Days and A Sampler, and two full collections, The Plucking Shed (2010) and Rise (2013), both from Cinnamon. This is the second part of my interview with her, plus a selection of poems from the new collection – the first part of the interview can be found here.

I like that idea of a sort of ongoing sequence, with Nuala popping up again and again in the future. Which brings me on to the subject of future work – do you do any planning of what you're going to write, or tend to let the poems 'come to you', and wait until they start to coalesce around a certain theme?

My first two collections were formed from poems that accumulated but that seemed to belong together. In general I let poems come to me, which so far they've been very generous about doing! 

But for a long time now I've had a particular sequence of poems in mind, loosely based on one of the Greek myths. It will be a pamphlet rather than a large collection and it has taken a lot of thought, many drafts, and was the major project I worked on at Hawthornden, although I did use that time also to tidy up the poems in the forthcoming Rise.

For this sequence I have read and re-read every version of the myth I can lay hands on (there are always so many versions of Greek myths, tiny little changes in the story can be worth seizing on), and I've tried it in close parallel to the myth and then, finding that didn't work, tried to ignore the myth altogether and just write the poems that tell the story as it is today.

One thing I would like to do, even if I have to do it at my own expense as a limited small booklet and find someone to illustrate it, is to assemble all the poems I've written about horses, another great love of my life. A handful appeared in The Plucking Shed and one in Rise but there are a good many more.

I have been looking at the kind of books book-binders and textile artists can create – saw some marvellous examples in the Scottish Poetry Library, and more at Ledbury Poetry Festival, also recently in a local exhibition which was a collaboration between poets and textile artists at Frodsham. I would love to produce something along those kind of lines, but my own handwriting is so appalling even I cannot read it. All I could do is create the poems!

I’m also collaborating with a friend, Polly Bolton, a singer and choir leader, to produce a sung/read show based on the lives of three Shropshire women. It is to be called Out of the Land, and the stories cover Molly Morgan who was bigamously married, transported to Australia twice, and thanks to the use of her charm and wit became a wealthy woman. The second is Katherine Moore, whose four children were taken from her and sent off to America on the Mayflower; only one survived. The third is Sarah Burton, whose home cottage was outside any parish boundaries so she was able to conduct a business as a midwife to unmarried mothers. Polly is setting the poems I've created to music, and some of her choir members will join us in the eventual production, which we hope will be spring 2014. It's been very exciting doing this and has involved a good bit of touring round Shropshire to see where the women came from and also researching laws of the time and anything we can find about their lives or life at the time, the 16th and 18th centuries.

So, a pamphlet needing much thought, a sung-and-read show needing a lot of work, and a would-be booklet of horse poems - I must have reached the age of Reason, not Intuition! But I am enjoying it very much.

Can I ask the old question about influences? Who are your main influences?

Influences? Oh Lord, such a hard question! I read very widely, buy more poetry books than I can afford, and love the work of so many poets, but if I must narrow it down, then I relish the sensuous, tactile richness of Keats as shown in Ode to Autumn and St Agnes' Eve, and some of the poetry of Alfred Noyes which enthralled me as a child, especially the rhythmic repetition of lines as in Sherwood, what I call 'chantery'! I discovered with joy the simple directness of Machado, Frost, and Edward Thomas. I also hold dear the mysticism of San Juan de la Cruz, and Kathleen Raine's ability to find the numinous in the humble, remarkably so in her poem Scala Coeli.

When I was ill I clung to Louis MacNeice's poem Snow as if it were a life-raft; indeed I had an article published in Poetry News on how much the poem had truly helped me, and that article led to a short series of poets writing about their own 'poems of significance'. I still greatly enjoy MacNeice's work. His poem Mayfly is a delight where he speaks of the mayflies going 'up and down in the lift' all day just for fun!

Later I came to admire the work of Denise Levertov, Jane Kenyon, Lorca, Luis Cernuda,  Eavan Boland, and Derek Mahon (the latter is very unlikely to remember it but we both worked at the Language Centre of Ireland, Dublin, for some months). At the moment I am re-reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath and feeling astonished yet again at her sheer power of language and expression.

But if you were to tell me I could keep only one poem to sustain me through life I would choose Denise Levertov's The Unknown. It perfectly describes our restless human longing for that vague 'something else':

"One doesn't want rest, one wants miracles". And when they don't happen

"Beaten you fall asleep... wake to witness...eager furniture, differentiated planes....the windows big and solemn, full of the afterglow...

The awakening is to transformation

word after word."

Isn't that what every poet seeks?

I'd like to repeat exactly what Roy Marshall asked me recently, because it's a fascinating question – one of the strengths of your poems is that they can read and appreciated or enjoyed by a ‘non-poetry’ reading audience. I’d like to relate this to something Don Paterson said in an interview last year, that poetry has a ‘moral obligation to clarity.’ I wondered what, if anything, this phrase might mean to you, and if the concept of clarity is important in your work?

Oh, without doubt my answer would be YES! Clarity is vital if you want a reading public, especially among those who are not themselves poets or dedicated readers of poetry. I'll underline my answer with this anecdote: at an open-mike I read my poem Message to the Well-meaning (from my previous book The Plucking Shed). Afterwards a man came up to me and said "Yes! That poem - it's exactly like that" and I felt so thrilled, the kind of response that's worth more than anything.

I strongly feel it behoves poets to remember they are writing for others; we're human-beings writing to bring alive the world and our experiences for other human-beings, to touch that chord of Yes! in others' hearts. And sometimes we succeed. I'm not a very public poet but I am lucky enough to have a small public of loyal readers who like my work. And that is joyous. If we lose sight of our readers we'll end up in an introspective world of poets reading to poets, which I suspect is a bit like where we are now, and probably why there's a slump in poetry-book buying. We have a duty (and the gift) to "awake" others to "transformation word after word", as in the Denise Levertov poem I quoted earlier in this interview.

Clarity is for me one of the hallmarks of a great poet like George MacKay Brown - through simple recurring images of daffodils, fish, salt, boats, storms, whisky, bread, corn, stars, and evidence of simple belief in the Christian calendar, he takes you with him through the seasons of the Orkney year. Marvellous work. There is a line in his poem Creator which says "He is the Seed locked in the House of Dust". That seed could easily be poetry; the poet's task is to set it free, make it grow.

Lastly, the enduring popularity of a radio programme like Poetry Please says it all. People want to hear tried, tested, and loved poems. Loved is the significant word. Poetry is about the heart, whatever its subject.

Simplicity. Honesty. Clarity.

Wonderful words. Wonderful.

Exorcising the chemotherapy wig

I buried it deep below

my cotton pants and nylon bras.

Wispy hair caressed the gussets, hooks.

In the basket on the wardrobe

it raised the hackles of its fur.

On still nights I would wake

and hear it purr.

In the solid wooden box

it's feelers palped the edges,

picking up my pulse.

In the grate I set a match to it,

watched it jerk and leap,

throw out angry sparks

until it stilled to ash.

Pig

Over her thirteen years of life

prolific litters squirmed against

her vast complacent sides.

He'd lean on the wall of her sty

for hours,

bring her offerings of cabbages,

corn stalks,

the incense, myrrh and gold

of beech nuts, acorns.

Shrouded in muslin,

glistening with salt,

her earthly self was turned to flanks

of bacon, ham.

At mealtimes he'd hold her flavour

on his tongue,

stretch out a hand,

as if to scratch once more her bristly back.

  

The Christmas helter-skelter

She thinks it's a lost lighthouse

Lifted from a coastal rock.

Red and white candy rock,

dropped in the city's square.

Its boards are bare,

no-one's riding it,

no music celebrates

it's strange appearance here.

She puts her small hand,

gloved in knitted snowmen,

into her mother's hand

and shakes her head.

Take it away, she says.

It makes her sad, as if she

should hug the lonely thing,

but how would her arms

reach round it?

Take it away, she says again,

meaning Take me home, Mummy,

take me home.

An interview with Gill McEvoy, part 1

Chester poet Gill McEvoy has published two (now sold out) pamphlets with HappenStance, Uncertain Days and A Sampler, and two full collections, The Plucking Shed (2010) and Rise (2013), both from Cinnamon. I talked to her at length about poetry, writing more generally, and the natural world. This is the first part of the interview - the second half will follow next Monday, along with some poems from Rise.  

Rise feels like a very natural progression from your first book; there's no trace of 'second collection syndrome' there. Was inspiration easy to find?

Thank you for that. I took considerable pains to avoid ‘second collection syndrome’ in putting the collection together. In terms of assembling the collection perspiration was more apt than inspiration! I worked very hard at considering the order of poems, rearranging many times until I felt they were about the best I could do. And then paring them down, a process greatly helped by the luxury of time at Hawthornden.

What I really wanted to do with this collection was to put the cancer experience to bed once and for all. I touched on it in Uncertain Days and more so in The Plucking Shed, but as you will appreciate, that diagnosis was one of the greatest shocks of my life. To learn that you may only have three months from diagnosis to leaving the planet is pretty scary. I hardly heard the proviso that followed which was that an immediate and brutal regime of chemo would have to be undertaken in hopes of saving my life.

It did, and I am so grateful for that! I wanted in Rise to include poems about that experience which were more wry, although still truthful, and to suggest some humour too. The poem Conservatory is rightfully the "farewell to all that" poem, after which I wanted to go on and celebrate the living world (cancer, peculiarly, is a great stimulant, since time to do things becomes incredibly valuable and valued). I included the sequences Nuala and Almond St to indicate firmly that cancer and the memory of it do not dominate my life. My work, I hope, has a wider range than that.

Inspiration comes often from the smallest things – the way a bird bathes in the bird bath, the way a leaf falls from a tree. I always have half an eye on what's going on beyond me, which is why I burn so many saucepans!

I think you very much succeeded in the aims you outlined there. I'll come back to the Nuala and Almond St poems a little later, and to your approach to the natural world, but I'm interested to know a little more about your working methods. You mention the value of time at Hawthornden – is that sort of 'time out' something you look for once the poems are written, or is it a source of new poems in itself?

Ah, working methods… hmm. Have to say I am a bit chaotic in that respect, having no set time when I write, and at the same time I’m prolific. Lines on scraps of paper, in various notebooks; scribbled poems the same. Every first draft is done by hand and as I write and think very fast I often can’t read the finished result unless I transfer it rapidly to the computer. After which, lots of redrafting! Like many other writers I have a love of good paper, splendid notebooks, fine pens, and stationery shops. I use Pilot pens, Hi Tec-point.

What keeps me grounded is having set challenges with two poet friends, a fortnightly one with Sheila Hamilton and a regular Monday morning one with Judy Ugonna (except in the summer months). Sheila and I take it in turns to set a theme, sometimes specifying format/ length and voice as well. Judy and I simply try to send each other either a new or reworked poem each Monday plus comments on the previous week’s offering.

However, it is a very different matter when it comes to putting a collection together. I work extremely hard at this, placing the poems, jiggling them about time and time again to get the best possible order, paring them down, re-reading, asking friends to proof-read them for silly mistakes/too many repetitions etc. Amazing how you can make a mistake with the layout of a title for example, and so easy to miss when you’re busy thinking about the meat of the poem itself.

I really do like to be away from home to do this – I need silence and no interruptions so I like to have only a good light and a large table or floor to spread work out on. No phone, no radio, no computer. TV? Well since I do not even have a TV at home that’s not an issue!

My Hawthornden Fellowship was wonderful in that respect – even the responsibility of meals and laundry was taken from my shoulders, leaving me utterly free to work, and to use the extensive poetry library there in complete peace. I loved every minute of being there and really didn't want to go home at the end of it.

I have also been very lucky in having two incredibly generous people in my life with cottages that they have loaned me occasionally to write in. In both of these I have managed to produce a very large body of work. Both places are in deep countryside with good opportunity for wildlife watching and that's given birth to many new poems.

Lastly, I do have to refer to the huge impact my illness has had on me. There is no whip to drive you like the knowledge of your mortality. I came very close to leaving the planet, and although I was fortunate and recovered, like many others who’ve been through cancer, I know time may not be on my side.

I think the experience of your illness also comes through in the way you approach your nature poems – there's a great immediacy to them, a reality, but also a fragility. There's been debate lately about whether nature writing can ever be more than consolatory, but I'd guess you'd disagree with that? (I certainly would!).

Your question seems deceptively simple but really it is one of the hugest questions to be asked. I instantly dispute the word ‘consolatory ‘ – who are we to expect nature to console us when we’ve done it so much damage – very clear in the fact that when you drive a long distance these days the car windscreen does not get covered in insects like it used to. Remember the days when your screen-wash only spread them further about the glass?

I’d like to tell you about something I witnessed one summer not so long ago. The soil in my garden is sandy, and I have a bird bath near enough to the kitchen window so that I can watch but not be intrusive. Three sparrows had a busy time dust-bathing and then all three capered in the bird bath water to clean themselves; it was, for me, a joyous sight. Then, so swiftly I wondered if I’d really seen it, a sparrow-awk flew in and bingo, only two sparrows lived to flee into the bushes nearby. Nature in the raw. I don’t bewail that, it’s how creatures survive, or don’t survive, in the food chain. And to see the female sparrowhawk on reconnaissance on the garden fence is an awe-inspiring vision; its white chest feathers blowing softly in the wind, its scaly yellow legs, powerful claws, vigilant huge yellow eye that misses nothing – well, breathtaking.

And I think that phrase ‘awe-inspiring’ is the key to how I see nature; I use my ears, my eyes, my sense of smell, touch and sometimes taste, in my apprehending of it. I often carry a pocket lens – “all the better to see you with, my dear”! So much to see, so much to learn, so much to rejoice in. It’s a privilege to be alive to witness the small daily miracles of the natural world.

I don’t think of my poems of observation as “nature poetry” but as poems about the remarkable world we live in. The very term “nature poetry” seems, sadly, to be slightly derogatory, as if the poet can write of nothing else. I feel it's one of the most important topics to be writing about these days when the very balance of nature is so under threat.

My illness may have coloured my poems about creatures to some extent – everything is fragile, including ourselves – but I was already a keen observer before I was ill. But now I do feel it all so intensely, extremely so.

I’d like to quote from the poems of Jaan Kaplinski:

The roof leaks,

the kitchen door won’t close, there are cracks in the foundation…

One can’t keep everything in mind. The wonder is

that beside all this one can notice

the spring which is so full of everything

continuing in all directions –

That expresses perfectly something of the way I feel – and that 'way' is certainly coloured even still by fear of there possibly not being enough time to do/see/write down everything I would wish to.

Lastly I remember one evening in the last hospital I was in, a cottage hospital where I'd been sent to 'convalesce'. A friend visited and I was that evening able to accompany them to the door. We opened the door onto the biggest, reddest January moon I've ever seen in my life. We both gasped. Suddenly I felt so small. And utterly overcome with awe.
That's what nature does for us, reminds us of our own insignificance. Not a bad thing; not a bad thing at all.

That's a fantastic answer, and exactly what I was hoping for. I agree totally about the 'consolatory' charge (it was levelled at Richard Mabey recently), and that even the term 'nature poetry' is wrong – it implies that what's being written about is somehow separate from everyday life, and it's that attitude that I think is to blame for many of the dangers facing the environment. Let's move on to the Almond Street poems - what was the original inspiration behind them? 

The birth of the Almond St poems was really quite surprising: I was running a workshop in Chester Library, in the Reference room upstairs. Outside the window we could see the top half of a helter skelter, plonked down in the city as part of the Christmas celebrations. Suddenly a young woman in the workshop stared at it and announced that it made her feel very lonely! Her comment caught in my mind so firmly that when I got home I began writing these poems and adding to them some previously written poems loosely based on my own childhood memories (Puddles is one, Fifteen Minutes of Fame is another), and also thinking about things I'd watched children do or tell about. Children behave in such engaging (or infuriating) ways. It's interesting watching the difference between what children do and what adults think they should do. The MacDonald's poem is from direct observation of an incident. So is the Christmas Market. So my Nuala is a kind of 'universal child', and I think many more poems might appear about her.

I included this sample of the Nuala poems in Rise and also the sample from the Almond St poems because I wanted to demonstrate clearly that I do follow other directions apart from illness and the natural world. Indeed I am hoping that for me the poem Conservatory will be the poem that lays the cancer experience to rest once and for all. This is indeed "my time now", my time to pay full attention to all the other things that interest me.

Poets as dragonflies

The weekly post at HappenStance's Unsuitable Blog is always worth reading, but here's a particularly good Odonata-themed one. Personally speaking, I'm just emerging after a few months of writing inactivity - probably still at the drying my wings in the sun stage.

Midstream

Thanks very much to Roy Marshall for choosing Midstream, one of the poems from my 2005 HappenStance chapbook Making The Most Of The Light, as the favourite poem of the week on his excellent (and frequently updated) blog.

The pamphlet is officially out of print, although I think I have two copies left should anyone want one - email me at the link on the right.

Looking ahead

I was browsing through the Inpress catalogue after Nine Arches posted it on their Facebook page, and a couple of volumes caught my eye immediately.

The first is Gill McEvoy's second full collection, Rise, from Cinnamon Press, which is out in May. It deals with her battle against, and survival of, ovarian cancer, and is the follow-up to her excellent first collection (also from Cinnamon), The Plucking Shed. She's also published two pamphlets with HappenStance, Uncertain Days and A Sampler.

The second book was Poems To Elsi, by RS Thomas, from Seren, which charts the course of an unusual and complex creative relationship. It's edited by Damian Walford Davies, and contains four previously unpublished poems - as something of a Thomas completist I'd buy it for those alone, even if it does feel a bit like when I used to search HMV for Japanese import albums which differed from the UK version by one track.

Oh, HMV! See what happened there? Topicality at last.

A taste of Extremadura

Poetry readings, on their own, can be strange things. It depends entirely on who’s reading, of course, but there’s always the risk that the audience will sink into a bit of a stupor after the first couple of poems.

There are ways round it. Having more than one reader can provide interesting contrasts, as can including open mic slots. As I’ve said before, that often has the interesting effect of producing themes that link disparate readers.

Another way, though, is to marry the poetry to something else entirely. Last night, at Uppingham Theatre, HappenStance poet Matthew Stewart did just that, reading from his new chapbook Tasting Notes, while allowing us to sample the wines that the poetry is concerned with (Matthew's day job is as blender and export manager for the Spanish wine co-operative Viñaoliva).

The event, run in conjunction with Bat and Bottle Wine Merchants of Oakham, drew a quite different crowd to your normal poetry reading, but you got the impression that most people went away having learned something about wine, and something about their own view of poetry. Non-poetry readers often tell you that they think of it as dry, dusty, academic and seemingly resigned to make the reader look stupid, but here it was concise, witty, and simultaneously gently mocked and quietly celebrated commercial language. Of course, one reason that works is that there's often the same feeling about wine talk - that pretentious and high-flown nonsense is being used to confuse the average buyer.

But anyway, if you'd like to sample both the wine and the poetry, have a look at these offers. They could make great Christmas presents.

Oh, and along with the wine, we got to try a couple of cheeses from Extremadura, some of the region's peerless jamon iberico de bellota, and chocolate figs. Very tasty indeed.

Jamon iberico de bellota

I've blogged in the past about HappenStance poet Matthew Stewart and his fine chapbook, Inventing Truth, which came out last year.

He's got a second pamphlet forthcoming, and a copy arrived from HappenStance last night. Called Tasting Notes, it is inspired by his work as a wine-blender in Extremadura, Spain.

He'll be launching it with a reading in Oakham at the start of October, of which more details as they arrive, but in the meantime Matthew has posted about Extremaduran ham - anyone who's been to the region (and I'd guess that that will include the majority of the birding readers of this blog) will know that he's right when he says it's the best ham in the world. Anyone who's not been to the region - go as soon as you get the chance. It's absolutely glorious.