This is a slight digression from the usual poetry posts but I’ve just finished reading Watership Down to my two sons. It was originally published when I was about the same age as my elder son and was one of the best books I read as a child. My old paperback still had the addition…
Author: Caroline Davies
Surfacing
The household has been struck down by ‘flu – having been the last to succumb it seems to have taken me an age to recover my energy and to get back to the poetry. The last thing I did before taking to my bed was a night out in London to hear Alice Oswald reading…
Up for the Prize
Sometimes, although this can be rare, planned outings have a way of working out perfectly and this is what happened with yesterday evening’s trip to the TS Eliot reading. Perhaps it is the effect of the South Bank weaving a kind of magic as it did last September when I was there for the reading…
Boxing Day Seventy Years on
I’m thinking of my Taid today, my grandfather, Jim Honeybill who, seventy years ago, will have spent the day getting ready to leave Malta with MV Ajax, in the company of the Sydney Star, Cty of Calcutta and Clan Ferguson, accompanied by Force K and heading for Egypt. I expect he will have been relieved…
Stateside – Jehanne Dubrow
Stateside This was one of my finds of 2011. I can’t quite remember how I came across the book, not in a bookshop that’s for sure. It was undoubtedly somewhere on one of my rambles round the internet. I often castigate myself for spending time browsing, hopping from link to link, then realising how much…
I name this ship – book launches
November has been a month of book launches for me, mostly friends books. By some miracle of organisation I’ve managed to get to three of them. The first was a Cinnamon Press launch for three North Walian poets, Steve Griffiths, Marianne Jones and Pete Marshall. This was held in a welsh language bookshop, Palas Pendref…
The original War poetry
Over the last week I’ve been reading Homer’s Iliad, finding my way into this rather daunting epic poem eased by Robert Fagles excellent readable translation and Alice Oswald’s latest collection Memorial. What Oswald does is to focus entirely on those who died – the boring bits as she refers to them. Of course Memorial is…
An evening with Edward Thomas
Went down to London yesterday for a day of culture – the Royal Academy in the morning, Poetry library in the afternoon and an evening with Edward Thomas. The evening was not as the delightful Matthew Hollis pointed out at the start with the man himself but with his poems. After one of his previous…
Writing away from Home
“There is no better air than here for work” John Maynard Keynes I’ve managed to line myself up two writing courses for this autumn. Last weekend was the Tilton House retreat led by Vanessa Gebbie. At the end of October I’m off to North Wales (again) for a whole week of writing with Cinnamon Press…
A little Historical research
Malta Convoys 1940-43 by Richard Woodman has been my heavyweight summer reading. It is the definitive history of the ships that supplied Malta and I’ve come to regard it as a sort of bible when it comes to finding out all the details. Unlike some of my other Malta reading it offers tantalising glimpses of…