"The water that is past.."

Recently I've been reading some of the work of Katrina Porteous, a poet who writes a lot about changing landscapes and vanishing communities. So it was interesting last week to visit Clencher's Water Mill on the Eastnor Estate near Ledbury, on a workshop organised by the Ledbury Poetry Festival. It's one of a series of mills that stood along the Glynch Brook and it milled flour for almost two and a half centuries before becoming redundant in 1939. Now it's been restored to full working order and we were shown around by a real enthusiast, who demonstrated the milling process and explained the technicalities.

What struck me very forcibly on the visit was the language of the mill, the words and phrases that must have been in common use in our great-grandparent's day but that are quite foreign to our generation - wallowers, brayers, layshafts, tuns, many more. Although I've written before about the tragedy of a language loss when a community becomes displaced or dies out, I hadn't paid a great deal of attention to the importance of individual words and their associations - some real food for thought there (and material for more than one poem).

In the afternoon we had a walk on the Malvern Hills, the stamping ground of much of my childhood and adolescence. It was interesting to hear the variety of poems that came out of the group's short time there - again a lot focusing on the history of the hills, the lives of the people who have lived, worked and walked on them over the centuries. Perhaps you'd like to hear them too - Jean Aitken, the "Troubadour of the Hills", will be launching a celebration of them at the Ledbury Poetry Festival in six weeks time; do join us for a poetry breakfast under the Market House, 09.30 - 10.30 on Sunday July 7th. Coffee and croissants included!

Mental Health Awareness Week

Commemorating a journey of creativity 

How appropriate that my guests on The Writer's Room broadcast this week should be members of the creative writing group at Newport MIND - it was a great way to mark Mental Health Awareness Week, to celebrate their writing and to give some publicity to the anthology "More Than My Mind" which they produced last year to mark 40 years of Newport's branch of the organisation. On the programme, along with their facilitator Helen McSherry, they read extracts from the book and other work and talked about their lives and their experiences of mental health problems; they spoke eloquently of the value they placed on the group itself and on the power of creative writing to help overcome problems that they faced.

The group's anthology came about through collaboration with a renowned Newport poet, Paul Chambers, and a National Geographic photographer, Daniel Alford. Some of the poems within it were written by members of other organisations the group connected with, including Age Alive, a Black and Minority Ethnic organisation. Under Daniel's tuition, the MIND Photography Group produced superb photos to complement the writing and the hard back book is really beautifully presented. Copies are for sale through Newport MIND and they're also available at the Riverfront Arts Centre in Newport - they're well worth a look at.

Helen McSherry with Giles Hibberd, Patrick Jeremy,
Mark Haines, Eamon Sweeny and Mark Vrettos

Poems and places

Women Aloud
Judith van Djikhausen, Christine Griffin, Gill Garrett,
Belinda Rimmer, Frances March, Angela France.

Last week was "one of those weeks" - when your feet hardly touch the ground and you skid from one thing to another. All enjoyable activities but no time to process what's going on and quite exhausting!

The Cheltenham Poetry Festival was as fantastic as ever, with a hugely varied programme and some tremendous poets participating. Women Aloud, the group I so value belonging to, started off the Sunday afternoon activities and we had a great, very appreciative audience. We were followed by Duncan Forbes and Ann Drysdale; Ann launched her latest publication Vanitas (Shoestring Press) last week and that's really worth investing in. My Catchword colleague Derek Healy was up next with Roy Marshall and Steve Walter; as ever I loved hearing his work, especially the poems from his collection "Made Strange By Time".  And it was back to Cheltenham on Wednesday to read with the Poetry Festival Players.  Our theme this year was "Water" and the programme encompassed  poets and topics from Shakespeare to Alison Brackenbury, The Lady of Shalott to the floods of 1947 and viewing the Severn Bore.

Then activities of a very different nature over the weekend; a Welsh learners course at Glan Llyn, the youth centre on Llyn Tegid. The saying goes of course that to be Welsh is to have poetry in your blood and music in your heart. There was certainly plenty of music, both on site and at the local pub. On Saturday morning we visited Yr Ysgwrn, home of Hedd Wynn, the shepherd poet whose poem was announced as the winner at the 1917 Eisteddfod before it was realised that he had been killed at Passchendaele six weeks beforehand. The "Black Chair" - the chair that had been draped in black as the Archdruid spoke of "the festival in tears and the poet in his grave" - is prominently on display in the house. I had visited and seen the chair a few years ago but the story bears telling many times over and the experience this time was just as poignant.

North Wales was beautiful in the spring sunshine and as inspirational as ever. There is so much history in its industrial landscapes, its towering mountains, its deep cut valleys. No wonder it has generated such a plethora of literature and poetry. This time I was very aware of the sadnesses, the injustices in much of that history, especially when standing by Llyn Celyn in the Tryweryn Valley, created by drowning the village of Capel Celyn in 1965 to provide a reservoir to supply Liverpool. Beneath the now peaceful waters lie 800 acres of land, the homes of forty eight people, a school, the chapel, post office, a Quaker Meeting House and its cemetery; the protests of every single Welsh MP, every member of its small Welsh speaking community and their neighbours could not save the village from destruction. "Cofiowch Dryweryn" (Remember Tryweryn) wrote the singer-songwriter Meic Stevens, a sentiment echoed around Wales; how much today we need to remember - and to act on that remembering - with so called "progress" threatening ever more communities and their ways of life.

Llyn Celyn