A sneak preview!

A stimulating morning yesterday at our monthly Hetton Cottage Poetry Group workshop - we were looking at the different ways in which members of the group had responded to an extract from "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvini -

"Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait in foreign unpossessed places..."

As always I was taken by the variety of interpretations that come out of a common exercise and very impressed with the resultant poems / prose poems. But the highlight of the morning had to be the sneak preview afforded by Jennie Farley's early Easter gift to each of us - a copy of her limited edition publication "Jocasta's Song" which will be launched at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival on April 27th, when she'll be reading with Eley Furrell at Tailors's Pub at 1.30pm. It's a sequence of poems based on women in myth and folktale - the betrayed Hera, Hecate the goddess of magic and witchcraft, Jocasta in the embrace of her son Oedipus - strong and beautiful poems about beautiful, strong women.