2019 Immagine & Poesia E Book, a 100th Birthday Tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti

January 2012, New York

The 2019 Immagine & Poesia E Book of international poems (some in French, some in English) and artworks has been launched. It is a 'Special Edition for Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 100th Birthday' and can be downloaded and viewed online.

I am delighted to have a poem included, a piece inspired by my visit to The Guggenheim in New York, and written in some ways as a response to Ferlinghetti's intriguing poem, 'Spring About To Happen'.

The E Book can be found by clicking the links below.

• Free download
• Online on ISSUU

Poets and artists in the volume come from many different countries, including Italy, France, USA, Canada, UK, South Korea, Mongolia, India, Argentina, Israel, Egypt and Iran. Do take a look.

Thank you so much, Lidia Chiarelli and Huguette Bertrand, for producing this colourful and wide-ranging birthday edition.

Immagine e Poesia was founded in Torino in 2007 under the patronage of the late Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan Thomas. You can read more about the movement here.

6th Festival of Suffolk Poetry

We had a terrific day last Saturday at the 6th Festival of Suffolk Poetry.

I heard lots of poetry, read a couple of poems (one was my Milestones Competition Penwith Finger Stone poem here) and attended a stimulating workshop on 'The Music of Place' led by Grevel Lindop.

HUGE THANKS to Festival Director, Colin (in photo above), the SPS Committee, our guest readers and all who helped to make it such a wonderful occasion.

Arriving early: outside the John Peel Centre, Stowmarket

Felixstowe Poetry Cafe embraced the theme of 'Earth and Space Matters': my poems were more 'earth' than 'space', touching on landscape and language. 

We welcomed Kate Foley as our new President and heard a wonderful song cycle of poems by our outgoing President, James Knox Whittet, set to music by Colin and sung by Lynne Nesbit.

Of Poems and Puffins

Puffins have been in the media recently, featuring in Adam Nicolson's BBC4 series, The Last Seabird Summer? There has also been some delightful footage on Wales, Land of the Wild (also BBC) of Puffins breeding on Skomer, a small island off the Pembrokeshire coast.

I had a Puffin poem published recently in #186 of Orbis (and was delighted to find it had received an Honourable mention in editor Carole Baldock's Readers' Awards). My poem, with an epigraph from The Birds by Aristophanes, a comedy about the original Cloudcuckooland, was prompted by a session I attended at the Norfolk Festival of Nature back in 2015, at which Mark Cocker and Margaret Atwood shared with the audience their concern over the nature words that had been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. My poem does not follow these words, or indeed the ones that feature in The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane, but I wanted to explore the plight of our threatened sea-birds.

Those who live within reach of Snape Maltings in Suffolk may be interested to know that there is an exhibition, 'The Lost Words - Forget me not', at The Lettering Arts Centre until 26th May.

And, speaking of Suffolk, do buy a ticket and come and enjoy the 6th Festival of Suffolk Poetry in Stowmarket on Saturday 11th May.