Blog Posts

March 29th, 2018

29/3/2018

It's almost spring here in Montalcino. On sunny mornings I've been slowly emerging from winter torpor, starting to try out some ideas for Lydia Needle's wonderful 50 Bees exhibition at the Richard Jefferies Museum, Swindon, June 2018. I've been thinking about the tree bumblebee's compound eye, a curved structure that looks almost quilted, made out of many hexagonal parts, the ommatidia. Each one is a lens that carries information to the bee's brain. Some things we can see, they can't. Some things they see, we can't. Somewhere in the middle, there's a kind of common ground.

One great thing about this project is how much more aware of bees it's making me. It's part of my morning happiness to notice a good number of bees congregating around the rosemary, which has never ceased flowering all through the hardest days of winter here. Even more joyful to count several different kinds of bee there. Still no Bombus Hypnorum so far though, but if I can I'll be patient.

Bee watching in Montalcino

4/2/2018

Thanks to Lydia Needle and the chance to participate in the 2018 50 Bees project, I'm now on the lookout for 'my' bee, Bombus Hypnorum or the Tree Bumblebee. None so far here in italy, but today I spent a happy half hour watching these beauties - I think they are Bombus Terrestris, the Buff-tailed Bumblebee, often the earliest bees to emerge on warm February days. Even so I was amazed to see that these ones weren't put off by yesterday's snowstorm! They love purple flowers, and there's plenty of rosemary here for a quick winter merenda. I'll be watching and writing about tree bumblebees as the spring starts to arrive...hoping that some bumblebee poems will start stirring too. Hmmm...

Closely observed...

29/12/2017

....after-life of trees, celandines, the sadness of thrushes, sphagnum moss and other wonders in the beautiful
Reliquiae Supplement 2017
(online from Corbel Stone press - click on the link above to download). I'm so pleased to have two poems there, alongside words from Gerard Manley Hopkins:Blunt buds of the ash. Pencil buds of the beech. Lobes of the trees. Cups of the eyes. Gathering back the lightly hinged eyelids. Bows
of the eyelids. Pencil of eyelashes. Juices of the eyeball. Eyelids like leaves, petals, caps, tufted hats, handkerchiefs, sleeves, gloves.
and many others. Reading through this morning sent me to a place of watchful waiting, good to visit just before the turn of the year.

Not Quite Hibernating

21/12/2017

A trip through wintery East London by train and bus to wonderful Paekakariki Press in Walthamstow has woken me up! Letterpress printing, an endangered method, is alive and well at this Walthamstow workshop, where the machinery is as beautiful as the poetry books they publish there. (Among others, I've been enjoying Chrissie Gittins' delightful collection 'Professor Hegel's' Daughter', and 'Patrick Bond's 'Signals on the Railway Land', poems celebrating a Sussex nature reserve.

This hulking beast is the Heidelberg KS Cylinder, brought from Coventry and now lovingly restored to good working order.

I spent an hour lost in the joys of 'The Printers Vocabulary' helpfully provided by Paekakariki: from 'Asses' (a term for compositors used by pressmen, in return for being called 'pigs' by the compositors), to the dreaded 'Balaaam box' (into which were thrown rejected manuscripts) and on to 'Xylonite' (nothing to do with the planet Xylon, it turns out) and Zincos (blocks used in producing engravings on zinc). Before I knew it, it was way past lunchtime and already getting dark. Back to hibernation then.

Watch this space for my new chapbook, 'White Roads', due out with Paekakariki in 2018.

Drought Days, Orchard Boats

31/10/2017

After a dry, dry summer here in Montalcino, the drought continues. Beautiful turning leaves in orchards and vineyards, but still hardly any rain.
This mornng I'm at my desk, writing a review for London Grip of this lovely poetry pamphlet by Maria M McCarthy: 'There are Boats on the Orchard'. It's bringing the vanishing orchards of Kent into this Italian room, and i love it that it is also quietly promoting the work of the Kent Orchards for Everyone project to save and restore orchards in Kent and farther afield. Another small book to celebrate, with its subtle ironies and delicate line drawings by Sara Fletcher. Well worth seeking it out, I think; available at Cultured llama.

At Swindon Bus Station I Sat Down and Wept...

10/10/2017

Not really! I got on the number 13 and went to the last two days of wonderful Swindon Poetry Festival. And wished I'd been there for more. I loved the Battered Moons prize-winning poems - stand-outs for me were the first prize poem 'If I Say, Flower' by Louise Grieg and Rachel Davies' irresistible commended woodlouse tribute, 'Chiggy Pig' (I've always been a huge woodlouse fan). I mean a very big fan, not a fan of huge woodlice. Although now I think of it... You can go to the linked site to read these two and other great winning poems.
This is me enjoying my first-ever festival performance, encouraged by the warm and responsive Swindon audience. Thanks to Cinnamon Press, I now have a cinnamon-red book to flick through with seeming nonchalance and read from in proper professional poet style. It was great going first in the set, so I could relax, calm down my blood-pressure, and listen properly to the amazing, brave and beautiful lines that came next from Daniel Sluman, followed by Julia Webb's darkly magical Bird Sisters.

Swindon's a very special place to perform your poems. Most of it happens inside the now-legendary Tent Palace of the Delicious Air. In addition to the starry night you can see here, the tent stretches back into an area with the audience lolling on cushions, Arabian desert-tent-style, or seated on chairs between walls with mandala-like panels, making it feel both intimate and limitless. And then there's Richard Jefferies, the Swindon naturalist who is celebrated at the museum where all this happens (he's the attentive little figure under the reading stand). I hope he liked my tree poems!

There were so many good people and great poems, it seems unfair to single any out. But look out for a show in development called Mad and Glow, from Jacqueline Saphra and Tania Hershman. I think it will be appearing at other events throughout the year. Be warned, both jam and Marmite are involved!

Altogether, Swindon was transformed for me during this weekend, thanks to the inimitable Hilda Sheehan and all who work so hard to make every aspect of the festival (including the late-night toast guzzling sessions!) so delicious.

All the fun of the fair - a great day out at Free Verse poetry bookfair, Conway Hall, London

3/10/2017

Walking from the number 8 bus stop to Conway Hall, I made myself a promise: this time I won't buy more books than I can hope to read in the next few months. Some hope!
But still, it was hard to choose... however, these are books I picked up from some of my favourites among the vibrant crowd of poetry presses at this year's fair, including my own publisher, sparky Cinnamon Press from Wales. I looked for poets I like or have read good things about and have been meaning to read, then found myself drawn to books with an interesting format, a well-chosen or spacious typeface, or even a pleasing shape. These are from: Rack Press, Paekakariki, Nine Arches, Emma Press, Cinnamon, and Herules Editions.
It's an event I look forward to, with free talks and readings (I happened upon a wonderfully entertaining set from Amy Deakin, Nick Eisen, George Harris, Rick Dove and Susan Evans, of William Cornelius Harris Publishing), and plenty more besides. Where else could you walk into a free day full of poetry people, poetry news, poetry books, workshops, and readings next to the Café on the Green in the little park nearby? OK, I admit there was no candyfloss, but they did provide a sublime veggie wrap and a great cup of coffee too. Now all I have to do it to get down to some careful reading as autumn sets in.

Time flies and this week it's National Poetry Day once more!

25/9/2017

Looking forward to it this Thursday, when I'll be reading with fellow Cinnamon Press poets at West Greenwich library. We'll make it a really special evening; I hope that some of my readers will be able to be there. Docklands Light Railway provides a lovely trip over to Greenwich for anyone coming from the North!

Remixed Borders revisited

8/9/2017

Kew Gardens - what a great poetry venue! On Wednesday evening some of us from the Mixed Borders garden residencies shared garden poems with a London Parks and Gardens Trust audience. The reading was held in the Sir Joseph Banks building, not as I'd imagined under banana leaves in the Palm House or surrounded by lotus blossoms in the Waterlily House. Still, it was lovely to hear more of the beautiful poems that came out of our garden residencies. An online 'flicky-book' is currently in production and will be available via The Poetry School, poetryschool.com.

A Restoration, revisited

31/7/2017

In Italy the heatwave continues. It's made it hard to find the energy to write, so that anything I've produced in the past month has emerged very slowly, and I'd like to say thoughtfully. But mainly just slowly.
This photo shows part of a fresco in the church of Sant'Agostino near where I live in Montalcino, whose restoration has also been progressing very slowly and in fits and starts, but is now once more underway.
Over several years I've been fascinated by the process, which has a wonderful, almost devotional quality. These beautiful frescoes (painted during the 14th and 15th Centuries, possibly by Bartolo di Fredi of the Sienese school) show scenes from the life of St Anthony. But what I love the most are the small peripheral depictions of everyday rural life at the time of the painting. In this one, three people (contadini?) are on their way to market, the woman carrying eggs, and on her head two unfortunate ducks! I wrote the poem below in 2014, when the fresco was just starting to reveal its rich colours. It's lovely to see the work coming close to fruition this year.

Duck Hat

Who is that woman with the two ducks
strapped to the top of her hat?
A basket of eggs, such a timid frown.
I’ve knelt close on folded sheets
for a fortnight, mending holes in her gown
with a fine white filler, edged

my narrow brush across her cheek.
As if she’s a lover or child, she needs
my kiss, but salt obscures her lip,
mottles the words she tries to mouth
in efflorescence. Here in the faintest slip
of lampblack, her cottage

hides among pines. All day I scrape
blown mortar, soothe hail-stone scores
with a spatula. Hills at her shoulder
wobble, terre verte, verdegris. Hands
reach and fail, lost in a fall of plaster,
caput mortuum, browned purple

at her feet. This is the lost treasure –
woman, duck hat, dancing dog – if only
I can give them back their shadowy journey
close to the bare earth, terra cotta, umber,
far from tin-leaf haloes, the well-worn story
told in cinnabar, shell gold, peach-stone charcoal.

You can find this poem and others set in England and Italy in 'Other Blackbirds' available from Cinnamon Press.