One of the benefits of having a dog is that you get to go on regular walks and so over the past year I’ve got to know the footpaths around the village very well. What I have noticed this autumn is the abundance of crab apple trees in the hedgerows. Almost every field seems to…
November is German Literature Month so I am about to make a start on reading All for Nothing – Alles Somst, which is this month’s title for the war and lit readalong. It’s described as Walter Kempowski’s crowning achievement and to judge from the opening chapter it is going to be a dark and compelling…
October has been a busy and productive month with four readings, culminating in the launch event for the CEGC ‘Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict’ project in the Maughan libraryat King’s College London. I read three commissioned poems, inspired by the lives of Wanda Gertz and Frederik van Eeden. The other poets were…
If you haven’t already bought a copy of Spacecraft by John McCullough then I would urge you to do so without delay. I’ve been reading and re-reading it since it was published in the spring but because I’ve been busy recently what with the trip to France and writing some commissioned poems that it has…
This Friday is the launch of the first of Laudanum’s books, featuring the work of my fellow poet, Stuart Mckenzie. It also includes poems by Joey Connolly and Philip Terry. I pre-ordered the book and have had it for several weeks. I was so pleased to see Stuart’s work in print, having becoming familiar with…
This weekend’s reading is going to be Andrea Holland’s Broadcasting. The first print run had sold out when I first came across it in 2013 but happily it has been reprinted. This is very much a book to my taste as the poems are about the five Breckland villages in East Anglia which were requistioned…
I wrote this in the library of the university where I worked for a decade and a half. These days as I concentrate on writing I’m using the library space as a form of mini-retreat. I know there are writers who can take themselves off to a nearby café or coffee shop but I get…
For this Friday and the weekend’s poetry reading I’ve gone back to Tamar Yoseloff’s A Formula for Night, which contains her body of work from twenty years and four collections plus new poems. Hitherto I’ve not made the time to read all the poems so I am looking forward to doing that and to finding…
August Poetry Postcard Fest 2016 cards received And here are the postcards which have made their way across the Atlantic… all 27 of them. I think there are more en route for those who have carried the fest on into September. In the mean time my thanks to Linda Malnack, Mary Beth Frezon, Rachel Barber,…
The poetry postcards from fellow poets continued to arrive until recently. So now it’s time to look back on August and a month of writing and receiving poetry postcards. Collage cards made by Caroline Davies I was far better prepared this year with more than enough cards to allow me to write 31 poems to…