Readings and Records

It was a really good evening at Smokey Joes on Wednesday at Poetry Cafe Refreshed. Jennie Farley read beautifully from her collection "My Grandmother Skating". Her poems are alive with lovers and wolves, cousins and monkeys, riding in horse-drawn carriages, seeking sanctuary in churches, playing with peg dolls in allotments - closely drawn characters in richly imagined landscapes as disparate as pre-revolutionary Russia and the family home territory of Lincolnshire. But I particularly enjoyed a preview of her new "gymslip" poems about her boarding school days; I look forward to hearing, and eventually reading, many more of those.

Jennie Farley

Then yesterday morning saw a group of us examining material from the Gloucester archives - a fascinating exercise. The documents (including court records, school logbooks, county asylum admission registers) are invaluable resources for historians, of course - but have so much potential for creative writers too. In the prison and asylum records from the early Victorian period - the days before photography and the "mug shots" with which we're all familiar - physical descriptions were carefully noted down. These added "flesh" to the names - the Josiahs and Felicias, the Malachis and the Emmelines - and a small leap of the imagination took you into their worlds of truanting, petty theft, acute mania or "moral danger". Rich pickings indeed for poets and story-tellers!