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.  

When is a Book not a Book?

Marble memorial

This post may be just a little off-topic, but I have just learned a new word...

B L O O K.

There is even a book about blooks and you can buy it here. 

According to its author, Mindell Dubansky, blooks are 'books that aren't', and the reason for this is that they are frequently, but by no means exculsively, made of stone like the ones in the memorial above, which adorn the church of St John the Evangelist in Oxborough, Norfolk. 

My interest in blooks stems from a piece about a small marble book I co-authored in 2010 with my husband, David Gill. It was published in OUP's Notes & Queries, volume 57. Little did I realise at that point that a stone book was, or would come to be known as, a blook. 

Earlier this evening I came across an article entitled Carved in Stone: American Stone Books by Ian Berke in the Maine Antique Digest (2015). The author had also written a guest post on Mindell Dubansky's blog, About Books - discovering the book as object.  

For more information ...

•  Collecting Books That Are Just Covers by Eve M. Kahn (New York Times, 2014)
• 19th Century Folk Art Carved Odd Fellows Sculpture Of A Book by Joey in his Anonymous Works blog. 

Was this delicious 'book cake' a 'blook'?

Winter Update, 2018

This picture seemed to me to have a wintry feel despite the fact the photograph was taken in summer! It depicts the Skye Bridge and the small island of Eilean Bàn. I have posted it to accompany a link (here) to my Skye poem, The Ceilidh House, about winter in the Inner Hebrides in times gone by. My thanks to Sharmagne and her editorial assistants for publishing my poem in the December issue of Quill and Parchment.

Special thanks, too, to Matthew Stewart for including this blog in his Rogue Strands 2018 list of poetry blogs. I feel very honoured to receive another mention. Thank you, Matthew.

A summary of my 2018 poetry activities can be found here. 

'Remembrance 100' and 'With Remembrance in MIND'

I have been running and judging a poetry competition in and for my local community as part of the programme of 'Remembrance 100' events in our church to mark the centenary of Armistice Day. The image above forms part of the cover of our competition pamphlet of poems. I have added a blue border to this screen image as, not surprisingly, white failed to show up on white!

The winners have been announced, and I am greatly looking forward to our Prize-giving Reading later this month.  

I shall be at a different church tomorrow evening, reading my Christmas Truce poem from Towards the light (Kapaju Books, 2018) ...

Poetry in Aldeburgh, 2018

I can hardly believe how quickly Poetry in Aldeburgh has come and gone this year. The weather was largely bright and fresh, and I'm guessing more poets braced the icy waters of the North Sea than on previous years, though I only actually saw one swimmer emerging over the shingle bank as I savoured my chips. 

I attended two workshops. They were both excellent, but very different from one another. My Friday workshop was led by Helena Nelson of HappenStance Press, and concerned the 'Ps' of having poetry published. My Saturday one, led by Pascale Petit, encouraged us to venture out of our comfort zones into the world of 'wild' and 'dangerous' writing.

So what did I buy during the weekend? Well, I was fairly restrained this year, having made a number of poetry purchases recently; but two volumes I could not resist were Mama Amazonica by Pascale Petit (having attended her 'wild' workshop) and a secondhand copy of The Trumpet and Other Poems by Edward Thomas. I added Kathleen Jamie's Collected Poems to my wishlist, perhaps with Christmas in mind, though I doubt I will feel I want to wait that long...

There is always a buzz in Aldeburgh during the days of the Festival, and it is always good to meet up with friends and to make new ones. The task now is to return to my notebook and attempt to tidy up those workshop drafts...