Places of Poetry

Serpentine lectern, Church of St Grade, Cornwall

I have been hoping to 'pin a poem' on the Places of Poetry map for some time, and finally achieved my aim this afternoon (only to discover that my husband, David Gill, had pipped me to the post by a few months!).

The map shadows an earlier poetry project which took the guise of a 15,000 line poem, Poly-Olbion, by Michael Drayton in the seventeenth century. You can read about the new map here, and you can read Drayton's epic if you follow this link to a University of Exeter website about the current project.

The new interactive online map is full of markers, representing poems relating to the sites in question. The map remains live for two more days for those who would still like to pin a poem of their own (please check the conditions if you do this). Thereafter it will remain online for web-users to enjoy as a reading resource. If you find a poem you enjoy, I feel sure the poet who penned it would appreciate a social media-style 'like'.

I recall submitting a northern (Lewis Chessmen) poem, number 185, to the StAnza Poetry Map for Scotland in 2015. And this time, on the new map largely representing England and Wales, I have zoomed down almost as far south as I could go to small cove on The Lizard in Cornwall to post my 2019 poem here. I do not actually mention lecterns in my poem, but the serpentine one in the photo above comes from the same Cornish peninsula and can be seen today in the beautiful church of St Grade.

I mentioned David Gill's poem in this post: you will find it posted along Hadrian's Wall - here. And, on the subject of the Wall, you might also enjoy Paul Farley's Places of Poetry blog post - here.