I always make time for poetry on Fridays, preferably with a mug of tea. This week’s reading material is Jane McLauglin’s prize winning first collection, Lockdown, which is being published by Cinnamon Press this weekend. I am really enjoying Jane’s use of imagery and the way her poems capture moments like snapshots. As I’m not…
Lallie and Victor – a mother’s locket
I have written previously about my great uncle, Robert Victor Davies but not about his older sister, Mary Eleanor who was known to the family as Lallie. During the summer I was going through a box of miscellaneous family photographs with my brother when we came across a locket. On one side it had a…
August Poetry Postcard Fest 2016 – ten years of postcards
It’s time to register for the annual jamboree of poetry postcards organised by Paul Nelson and Lana Ayers. The countdown clock shows there’s only a few days to go before registrations close. Once you’ve signed up you’ll receive a list of the other 31 members of your group and it will be time to start…
Have you forgotten yet? Afermath by Siegfried Sassoon
For me the most poignant part of the Somme Commemoration from Thiepval was Charles Dance, standing under the great arch and reading Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon. Aftermath Have you forgotten yet?… For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days, Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city…
Things of the Spirit
Time for a catch up about what I’ve been up to during the last month. In the middle of June I went off to leafy St John’s Wood and the Liberal Jewish Synagogue for ‘The Poet’s Quest for Peace’, a one day festival of poetry and conversation. I’d volunteered to help with the English PEN…
Commemorating the Battle of the Somme on a local scale
On the evening of first July my fellow poet, Neil Beardmore and I held a poetry reading at All Saint’s Church in Wing to remember the men killed on the first day of the battle of the Somme. In choosing which poems to include we went back to the words of the men who fought…
Round up of recent and planned poetry happenings
One of the poems in Voices from Stone and Bronze inspired by the work of historian Peter Barton has been commended in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Competition. Judge Roger Elkin comments “Peter Barton’s Lessons of History admirably celebrates the photographic and archaeological research into the mass graves of soldiers and tunnel excavations at the Somme by…
Is it worth your while to do a Writing Retreat?
Recently Sarah Selecky has published series of articles recently about writing retreats, both the tutored and non-tutored kind and I’m starting to make plans for a week on retreat in North Wales later in the year. The person I’m currently mentoring with Cinnamon Press recently been on a retreat with Arvon so I’ve been…
Voices from Stone and Bronze
I’m launching my second poetry collection, Voices from Stone and Bronze today, and I will be reading in Milton Keynes, London and North Wales. You can order your copy from Cinnamon Press. With thanks to Jan Fortune, Vanessa Gebbie, and Jeremy Banning and also all the members of the Thursday advanced poetry group who…
Ways into Poetry – A Year with Rilke
Often when I suggest to people that it would be good for them to read more poetry they sigh and reply ‘I wish I could but I just don’t have the time’. But we all make the time to eat every day don’t we and spending time on poems is another form of nourishment. Part…