Springtime - almost!

Having written last time about a bookshop called "Snowdrop" - I've now seen my first actual snowdrop of the year, which has cheered me considerably! I know that we really shouldn't complain when the poor folk of Somerset are still inundated with flood water and in a really bad way, but the endless rain of recent weeks has been so depressing that even a hint of spring makes the spirit soar.

And this year there's so much to look forward to in the spring - almost wall to wall poetry to start with. The Cheltenham Poetry Festival runs from March 28th to April 6th. but there will be a preview weekend preceeding it at which Picaresque will be performing on March 22nd - we're preparing for that at the moment and I'm also putting together a poetry appreciation presentation to give at five elderly care facilities over the festival period as part of an outreach programme. The week running up to Easter sees a four day poetry course run by Kim Moore in Cumbria and the weekend after Easter is the Much Wenlock Poetry Festival in Shropshire - always a great weekend.

But I must mention a fantastic evening last week - advertised as "A gothic fairytale for a winter night". Jennie Farley gave a superb reading of her verse narrative "Shadow Play" at Deepspace Arts Centre in Charlton Kings complete with sound effects and shadow puppets. The weather outside was foul but it was more than worth braving it to enter into the nursery world she so convincingly (and chillingly!) created.

Poems on postcards

There is a wonderful shop in Worcester, "Snowdrop Books", which sells second hand books and also cards in aid of St. Richards Hospice. I spent a happy hour browsing there last week and bought a whole selection of postcards, with illustrations that vary from the creatures in Beatrix Potter stories to a French illuminated manuscript - not to send to anybody or to decorate my walls, but to write poems on!

When I've got a big piece of work underway it's sometimes nice to "turn off" for a while and just write a few lines or a paragraph or two of something different. I find the correspondence space on the back of a postcard ideal for a mini-saga or a short poem inspired by the picture. I was quite moved by one of the cards I bought last week -  of a marriage quilt worked by a young woman in Allendale in 1860 and now on display at The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. The following lines, hopefully written in the style of the time, fit neatly on the back of it.

         Marriage Quilt

        She stitched in youthful love and hope,

        then brought it, the dutiful wife,

        to the conjugal bed they shared throughout

        their fifty year married life.

        It felt the weight of shawl and shroud,

        it knew sickness, passion, pain;

        now gently it covers her still, silent form

        as she takes leave of her home once again.

(Copyright Gill Garrett 2014)

 

The Dymock Poets - plus one?

Living less than twenty miles from Dymock, I have long been an admirer of the six poets who bear the name of that pretty Gloucestershire village, and I'm a member of the Friends of the Dymock Poets (which exists to keep alive their memory and their work). This year sees their centenary - it is a hundred years since that brief but intense period of creativity blossomed and flourished with such superb results.

The Dymock Poets were not always six in number however. The name was first given to four of the poets - Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred Gibson, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas - in the 1930s. John Drinkwater and Rupert Brooke were added in the 1950s by the then vicar of Dymock, an enthusiastic local historian. And now it's been proposed that another poet should be added - Eleanor Farjeon.

If you don't know about Eleanor Farjeon - or perhaps only that she wrote "Morning Has Broken" and many plays, stories and poems for children - do look her up and read some of her work. Perhaps her well known friendship with Edward Thomas, to whom she was devoted, has obscured her own achievements. She was an established, published poet before she met the Dymock friends, was a faithful chronicler of some of their meetings and wrote extensively throughout her life.

In the past could it be that her gender stood in the way of her acceptance as a Dymock Poet? I have a strong feeling that that might have been the case; in the forthcoming ballot of Friends to decide the issue, I shall certainly be voting for her adoption.