In light of the Coronavirus pandemic, festival Director Anna Saunders and team have made the heartbreaking decision to postpone the Festival until late September. This also means that Anna’s book launch is also rescheduled.

Feverfew – Indigo Dreams Pubs Ltd – ‘a bold and intense collection where candid, confessional poems meet richly lyrical, mythically inspired verse.’
https://www.indigodreams.co.uk

They’ve taken the decision to put the community’s welfare above their own means of earning a living but of course, many other events and launches have been cancelled everywhere.

No-one makes much profit (if any) from these events. Many use their own funds and who blames anyone who needs to keep going as long as possible or until their Governments restrict movement more stringently? It must be a difficult call.

I  think so much of how hardworking people are in the arts and how much they support and encourage talent, both established and newly-hatched. Indeed I and many I know have benefited hugely from their help.

It’s so upsetting to read of the hardship being encountered by independent organisations and individuals everywhere. They slip between the rules governing statutory sick pay and other funds that might help to keep their organisations and indeed themselves, going. I fear that many may not withstand this latest setback and really hope that they can get some help with the loss of income.

I’m going to ensure that I support the festival this Autumn and hope that many of us will try to support other groups as much as possible.

So here’s wishing ‘Good Luck’ to Anna and her team and to ALL other independents in a similar position and well … stay well everyone!

A heartfelt message from the White Cliffs of Dover from Sid and Stephen here

Today I am sad but I am a proud European still.

It’s a great festival, packed with talent; exciting, edgy and unmissable.

Check out events and book tickets here

I’ve gone ‘Wild’ and booked early for some events/workshops. More nearer the time.

• First event is the launch of Festival Director Anna Saunders‘ new collection Feverfew from Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd
• 
  Festival Director Anna Saunders and Charlie Baylis
  
  Anna is also a workshop leader and excellent poet. She champions both established and new poets. I’ve benefited from her workshops and had several poems published as a result. She’s lauded as:

‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts’ Bernard O’Donoghue

Anna’s reading with Charlie Baylis who is a Pushcart Prize and Forward Prize nominee and Poetry Editor of Review 31 and Assistant Editor of Broken Sleep Books.

• Next event I’ve booked is the ‘Indi-Go Wild Showcase from Indigo Dreams’
  Ronnie Goodyer  &  Dawn Bauling
  Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd eds. 
  

‘Indigo Dreams is an award-winning publisher renowned for beautifully produced poetry collections from new and established writers. Join us for one of the legendary (and usually sell-out) Indigo Showcases, featuring four exciting poets’

It will feature: co-director Ronnie Goodyer , co-director Dawn Bauling, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Jenny Mitchell.

I have read many of their poets and enjoy their work and the IDP readings.

• Angela France and Penelope Shuttle 

  
  Angela France                                    Penelope Shuttle

Dr. Angela France – is senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire and widely-published poet. Her recent collection The Hill  is published by Nine Arches Press. (This is an excellent press). She’s an brilliant tutor and I’ve attended her workshops and will be pleased to rejoin them this year.

Penelope Shuttle – is a multi-award winning poet and novelist – Eric Gregory Award, Greenwood Poetry Prize, Cholmondley Award and Shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. I am very excited to hear her read!

• ‘An Evening with Carol Ann Duffy and Friends’ 

  
  Carol Ann Duffy – U.K. Poet Laureate (2009-2019)Carol Ann was a U.K. Poet Laureate and is Professor and Creative Director of the Manchester Metropolitan University’s Writing School. I enjoy her work and have seen her read before but it’s always excellent.

  She’ll be reading with poets that I haven’t seen before: writer and poet, Keith Hutson, poet, writer and playwright Mark Pajak and award-winning poet Ella Duffy. So I’m excited to hear all three.

• ‘Dear Dylan – A Tribute to Dylan Thomas with Special Guests Hannah Ellis and Roy McFarlane’ 

  I’m really looking forward to this event, especially as the great poet Dylan Thomas’ granddaughter Hannah Ellis will be:

‘offering a very personal insight into the life, soul and creative genius of this much-loved poet’.

Hannah Ellis, granddaughter of Dylan Thomas.

Hannah will be talking about her favourite of her grandfather’s poems, as will the Indigo Dreams Press poet, Roy McFarlane.

Roy McFarlane

I’ve also booked for two exciting poetry workshops –

Graham Burchill and Rosie Jackson Workshop: Beyond the Frame

Rosie Jackson                        Graham Burchill

This will be a workshop based on art so I presume will involve writing ekphrastic poetry. I enjoy using prompts such as this, so it should be really good.

Carrie Etter Workshop – Where Are You From? Selfhood, Place and Prose Poetry.

Carrie Etter

I’ve read Carrie’s collection Imagined Sons and loved it and I saw her read it at an earlier CPF. I’m very interested to work with her and also to learn more about Prose Poetry.

SO! I have a wonderful time coming up this April and I know I’ll be tempted by more events. Will feed back after then.

Happy Writing All

Sparkly Isla says ‘Happy New Year’!

Well Isla and I have been thinking about new year’s poems and we like this   –

December 31st

BY RICHARD HOFFMAN

All my undone actions wander
naked across the calendar,

a band of skinny hunter-gatherers,
blown snow scattered here and there,

stumbling toward a future
folded in the New Year I secure

with a pushpin: January’s picture
a painting from the 17th century,

a still life: Skull and mirror,
spilled coin purse and a flower.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55695/december-31st

I love this poem. With it’s personification of Hoffman’s future actions as a ‘band of skinny hunter-gatherers/ blown snow scattered here and there’ as they stumble towards whatever the new year holds. Genius.

It might seem a bit morbid to talk of death in a new year’s poem! I think it’s more about beginnings and endings.

I also like his reference to the 17th Century art of Vanitas and Momento Mori which are a reminder of our mortality but also here, a reference to the dying year. To me, it’s a reminder that a new year brings an opportunity for change – to review our actions in the knowledge that our time is limited.

He also displays a mirror, a spilled coin purse and a flower. There’ll be other, likely better, interpretations but I imagine the mirror as an invitation to look at ourselves honestly. The flower alongside the skull is literally death and life co-existing as part of the same cycle.  It could also be viewed as new life, or hope of a future and well the spilled money? Not sure but maybe a suggestion that it can’t buy immortality or maybe a suggestion not be wasteful, or to share it perhaps! Maybe you’ll know … or maybe all interpretations are valid.

I’m interested to know of more favourite ‘new year’ poems … 

Happy New Decade one and all!

May it bring greater peace and understanding 💕

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in Portadown, County Armagh, and was raised near The Moy, in Northern Ireland. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father a farm laborer and market gardener. He is the author of a number of poetry collections, including New Weather (1973), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting the British (1987), New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996), Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, Horse Latitudes (2006), and most recently One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Selected Poems 1968-2104 (2016), and Frolic and Detour (2019). He has also published collections of criticism, children’s books, opera libretti, song lyrics, and works for radio and television.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-muldoon

I’m choosing his as my favourite Winter poem, as it offers the excitement of raw, chill from the mythical ‘North’. Fly Agaric mushrooms have an hallucinogenic property. They hold a religious significance for people from Siberia and the Sami peoples of Scandinavia, who imbibe them. It’s said that when the Sami people then urinate in the snow outside their dwellings, the Reindeer come and drink it, in order to benefit from the pyschoactive properties!

Trance by Paul Muldoon

My mother opens the scullery door
on Christmas Eve, 1954,
to empty the dregs
of the tea-pot on the snowy flags.
A wind out of Siberia
carries such voices as will carry
through to the kitchen—

Someone mutters a flame from lichen
and eats the red-and-white Fly Agaric
while the others hunker in the dark,
taking it in turn
to drink his mind-expanding urine.
One by one their reindeer
nuzzle in.

My mother slams the door
on her star-cluster of dregs
and packs me off to bed.
At 2 a.m. I will clamber downstairs
to glimpse the red-and-white
up the chimney, my new rocking horse
as yet unsteady on its legs.

I’m a huge fan of Helen Ivory’s work. Both a visual artist and poet, her language paints luminous word-pictures and IMHO, her latest collection is one of her very best. I urge anyone interested in poetry to read Helen’s work. Her voice is highly original, with striking imagery and language.
I think that she’s one of the U.K. best. (Scroll down for my review)

Her artwork won an award for best cover.

See Helen’s website here: http://www.helenivory.co.uk/

Helen also edits the renowned poetry zine ‘Ink Sweat & Tears Poetry and Prose Webzine’ with publisher Kate Birch. You can read and submit here: http://www.inksweatandtears.co.uk/

See mine and other reviews and purchase Helen’s book here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R121KSKDASEJ2M/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1780374690

Amazon Customer Review by Kathryn Alderman

K. M. Alderman5.0 out of 5 stars Masterful, a ‘must-read’.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 November 2019Format: Paperback

Helen Ivory’s parlour doll on the cover of The Anatomical Venus (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), echoes what’s within. The collaged, angel-winged beauty, be-skirted in a dead wedding bouquet, will be ‘served up’ as morsels of her othering in her many incarnations. She is a wanton sex-siren, witch, feeble-headed ‘slattern’ or unclean invalid – at once, Coventry Patmore’s housebound Angel (1854) and Kramer’s witch (1487) and all states between.

Through referencing numerous written sources and historical events, Ivory offers a pinpoint analysis of the received wisdom about women. For example, she cites nineteenth century asylum records and Freud in ‘Female Casebook 6’ (p.26) and ‘Housewife Psychosis’ (p.18) and references Shakespeare’s Ophelia (p.48) amongst a host of feminine constructs.

Through masterful language and imagery, Ivory conjures a collage of stories and voices, or the voiceless ventriloquized. In ‘Stillborn’ (37)

‘a half-made girl
with a secret interred in her womb’

whose grief at loosing her ‘unborn’ is voiced only through her disturbed behaviours in St. Andrew’s Asylum. Or Venus morphs into a

‘blood and earth caked’

wise woman in ‘Cunning’ (23). She guides women through to birth with ancient wisdom foraged from hedgerow pantries, whilst the physician who ‘invents’ himself in the ‘empirical light of day’ will ‘rip off [your daughter’s] head with forceps’.

Venus is confined under the weight of societal dictates, where even the voice of God pronounces her wanton nature in for example in ‘The Kept House’ (12). However, Ivory’s humour often gilds the burden with satirical observation:

‘When the Lord spoke unto her
He had already taken up residence
inside her house
and had much reduced her larder’ (34).

The Anatomical Venus of the title was an Eighteen Century phenomenon. These were wax forms of reclining female nudes, beauties with real hair and pearls, whose torsos could be removed for the male gaze to examine the internal organs, as though with some museum exhibit. Helen Ivory’s portraits weave an overview of women’s ‘othering’, of the entrenched ways in which the feminine principle has been and is subjugated and abused. It is masterful, a ‘must-read’ for all.

I seem to have used two similar posts for my first entries to WordPress. Apologies. I thought I’d lost the first draft so made a second one, which was slightly shorter than the first, due to running out of patience! Hey ho.

I was going to post a poetry review today but instead, wanted to say this –

Everything Stops for Tea!

There May Be Trouble Ahead …

There’s a Great British Cliche that any difficult issue, be it M&S selling out of your favourite knickers or trying to solve the global Climate Emergency, that can’t be improved with a ‘nice’ cup of tea.

To say that things are ‘very difficult’ here in the U.K. and in England in particular is an example of the fine British art of understatement. Floods, climate emergency, political turmoil, austerity, and unrest on a global scale; we need an awful lot more tea.

We’ve had a very contentious vote on BREXIT (the decision for Britain to leave the European Union) and the whole of the U.K. is still divided along set lines of Remain or Leave.

I keep hearing William Wordsworth’s words …

London, 1802

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

From the Poetry Foundation https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45528/london-1802

… okay, a little on the idealistic side maybe, but a call to be better at least.

I’ll be up front and say that I was and am still, a ‘Remainer’. I believe our nations should have the right to choose to either accept the ‘deal’ made by politicians or reject it, as its consequences will echo down the generations. BUT I am not into attacking anyone who wanted to Leave the EU and a lot of people are very concerned at this toxic culture of ‘othering’ people. If we profoundly disagree and can’t resolve issues through debate then I’d argue it’s time to stop to reconsider our course of action.

Things have gone too far when our Press and Politicians, on all sides of the divide, can’t feel safe due to death threats and actual physical assault. I think now of the horrendous and vile murder of Labour Politician, Jo Cox. Someone decided to stab her when she left her constituency office, because they didn’t agree with her Pro-European stance. All her dedication and caring for the people she represented, were completely overlooked through this act of blind fury and left her young children without a mother. What are we thinking?

It’s such a wonderful testament to her memory that Jo’s family have continued her legacy with the Jo Cox Foundation

‘Our vision is for a kinder, more compassionate society where every individual has a sense of belonging and where we recognise that we have more in common than that which divides us.’

Jo Cox Foundation at https://www.jocoxfoundation.org/vision

YES!

Hostility and intolerance has become a part of our every day it seems but I’m pretty sure that whatever dark forces swirl beneath these uncertainties, they can’t win as long as we still have HOPE.

Let’s end on a lighter note! Here’s Professor Elemental with his take on Jack Buchanan 1930’s song ‘Everything Stops for Tea’ best served with a tasty portion of irony – enjoy!