I’ve been reading novels recently and it has been a while since I wrote about poetry reads so I’m glad to get back to it. I have three poetry books on the go at present; Diaries of Exile by Yannis Ritsos, Memorandum poems for the fallen by Vanessa Gebbie and Marine by Alan Jenkins and John Kinsella. It’s thanks to the…
It gives me great pleasure to welcome Lucinda Neall to the blog today. Lucinda is the daughter of Michael MccGwire who was a midshipman in 1942 and served on the H.M.S Rodney during Operation Pedestal. He later went on to have a distinguished career as an academic after serving in the Royal Navy. Lucinda is a…
The Poetry School has been given permission by the Imperial War Museum for a public screening of the Battle of the Somme film at the Cinema Museum, London on Saturday 4th February 2017. A group of ten poets, including myself, guided by Simon Barraclough and Julia Bird, have been working on poems written in response to…
Today I’ve gone back to Choman Hardi’s Considering the Women.An important book with a central sequence of poems about the Anfal genocide of the Kurds in 1988 in which over a hundred thousand people were killed. I have heard her read twice at Aldebugh and in London at the Poet’s quest for peace. There are two…
I’ve been doing some more reading and research after last week’s blog post on Sdney Greenfield. He was awarded the MC in July 1918. The citation as published in the London Gazette on 18th July reads “2nd Lt. Sidney Richard, Greenfield, North’d Fus. For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. As intelligence officer,when all communications…
I have a couple of items of poetry reading lined up for the weekend. The first is Clare Best’s poem, Cell, which will unfold into a cell with artwork by Michaela Ridgway. I’ve been saving this up until I had enough time to read it properly. I was going to describe this as a poetry…
During this year’s battlefield’s tour with Jeremy Banning we went back to the area around the Wancourt tower above the river Cojeul. I had a vivid memory from a previous occasion of Jeremy reading Second Lieutenant Sidney Greenfield’s account of part of the battle of Arras and the capture of the tower. This October as…
I had the pleasure of introducing Matt Merritt at Ouse Muse this week and hearing him read from his two collections from Nine Arches Press. I had already browsed my way through The Elephant Tests and as so often happens have gone back to the poems with even more enjoyment through having the poet’s voice…
This year’s annual trip to the Somme battlefields included a visit to the Cambrai memorial at Louverval. I’ve written about Charles Jagger previously on this blog and about his work in poems in Voices from Stone and Bronze so I was keen to see the two Portland stone reliefs which he’d created for the memorial.…
I’ve been busy for the last couple of Fridays with poetry related activities in Aldeburgh and North Wales so haven’t had a chance to share a Friday poet recently. I’ve come back from Wales with Becky Cherriman’s glorious Empires of Clay. It is so exciting to get my hands on this book. There is sometihng about…