I seem to have lined myself up with a variety of poetry events to go to over the next few weeks – partly because it’s National Poetry Month, partly because it’s my birthday month but also because I need to get out more. First up is David Harsent’s poetry workshop in Cambridge on Saturday, part…
Discovering Paul Durcan
A poet I’ve discovered recently whilst on holiday in Ireland is Paul Durcan. ‘Discovered’ is not quite the right word as he was a poet I was aware of but hadn’t got around to reading properly. He has a new collection out and so was all over the Irish papers while we were there. ‘All…
Watership Down
This is a slight digression from the usual poetry posts but I’ve just finished reading Watership Down to my two sons. It was originally published when I was about the same age as my elder son and was one of the best books I read as a child. My old paperback still had the addition…
Surfacing
The household has been struck down by ‘flu – having been the last to succumb it seems to have taken me an age to recover my energy and to get back to the poetry. The last thing I did before taking to my bed was a night out in London to hear Alice Oswald reading…
Up for the Prize
Sometimes, although this can be rare, planned outings have a way of working out perfectly and this is what happened with yesterday evening’s trip to the TS Eliot reading. Perhaps it is the effect of the South Bank weaving a kind of magic as it did last September when I was there for the reading…
Boxing Day Seventy Years on
I’m thinking of my Taid today, my grandfather, Jim Honeybill who, seventy years ago, will have spent the day getting ready to leave Malta with MV Ajax, in the company of the Sydney Star, Cty of Calcutta and Clan Ferguson, accompanied by Force K and heading for Egypt. I expect he will have been relieved…
Stateside – Jehanne Dubrow
Stateside This was one of my finds of 2011. I can’t quite remember how I came across the book, not in a bookshop that’s for sure. It was undoubtedly somewhere on one of my rambles round the internet. I often castigate myself for spending time browsing, hopping from link to link, then realising how much…
I name this ship – book launches
November has been a month of book launches for me, mostly friends books. By some miracle of organisation I’ve managed to get to three of them. The first was a Cinnamon Press launch for three North Walian poets, Steve Griffiths, Marianne Jones and Pete Marshall. This was held in a welsh language bookshop, Palas Pendref…
The original War poetry
Over the last week I’ve been reading Homer’s Iliad, finding my way into this rather daunting epic poem eased by Robert Fagles excellent readable translation and Alice Oswald’s latest collection Memorial. What Oswald does is to focus entirely on those who died – the boring bits as she refers to them. Of course Memorial is…
An evening with Edward Thomas
Went down to London yesterday for a day of culture – the Royal Academy in the morning, Poetry library in the afternoon and an evening with Edward Thomas. The evening was not as the delightful Matthew Hollis pointed out at the start with the man himself but with his poems. After one of his previous…