HQS Wellington is currently hosting an exhibition about Operation Pedestal, which took place seventy years ago. During the summer holidays I took my sons to see it and the ship. To be honest this was really an outing for mum as I wanted to have a look round the ship and although I’ve done plenty…
Author: Caroline Davies
Fighting Terms – Thom Gunn
Some recent on-line conversations have revived my interest in Thom Gunn’s poetry. I have several of his collections and his Selected which I browse from time to time. I realised I had not however engaged with his work with sufficient attention. So I decided to read through all his poems chronologically taking in the full…
Pudney and Auden
One of the discoveries of Thank Goodness for Cake was that John Pudney was at school with Auden. He was two years older and fell in love with Pudney in his final term at Gresham’s in a very decorous manner “We still addressed each other by our surnames”. Pudney was awed by this older boy…
Thank Goodness for Cake
John Pudney at the National Portrait Gallery In an earlier blog entry I mentioned my interest in John Pudney and having come across references to his autobiography Thank Goodness for Cake (TGFC), I ordered it sight unseen. It was published in 1978 the year after he died. I anticipated finding out more about his wartime…
In the beginning…’
I’m very near the end of the process of putting together my first collection to be published by Cinnamon Press next year. When I say near the end this is not so much me sprinting for the finishing line as edging my way up a cliff but my fingertips but I’ll get there. I’ve started…
Collected Poems – John Pudney
I have one of my academic colleagues, Jonathan Rix to thank for reminding me of John Pudney’s poems. He was enthusing about some of Pudney’s RAF poems – Smith and Missing Smith, living on air, Your astral body A mechanic wonder Your anger an affair Of fire and thunder. So I’ve been reading his collected poems, published in…
Whistle by Martin Figura
If I were to tell you that Martin Figura’s father murdered his mother when he was a boy and ended up in Broadmoor and that Martin has written a book of poems about his childhood I can already see you stepping back and turning away. I can imagine you thinking how sad and what a…
The rest is silence
I have been thinking about ‘voice’ a lot recently as many of the poems in my Malta sequence are written in men’s voices, apart from the section in my mother’s voice as a young girl. We discussed the use of voice at the end of the last Cinnamon Press course. One of the other participants…
Out and about
I seem to have lined myself up with a variety of poetry events to go to over the next few weeks – partly because it’s National Poetry Month, partly because it’s my birthday month but also because I need to get out more. First up is David Harsent’s poetry workshop in Cambridge on Saturday, part…
Discovering Paul Durcan
A poet I’ve discovered recently whilst on holiday in Ireland is Paul Durcan. ‘Discovered’ is not quite the right word as he was a poet I was aware of but hadn’t got around to reading properly. He has a new collection out and so was all over the Irish papers while we were there. ‘All…