My diary posts are the place for a bit of my news and poetry community news, plus my adventures in creativity.
As February drifts into March I find myself thinking winter has passed swifter than I imagined, but has it? I recall last Spring was the most dark and miserable I think I can ever remember since my mum died, and the summer was not much better and as a sun seeker, a sun worshipper, however zen I try to be about the seasons I have to confess winter is something I endure rather than enjoy.
I’ll be heading off at the end of the month for a break beneath the Atlas Mountains, above the Western Sahara, to a small city kissing the ocean. One where days and nights are almost of equal length, a permanent equinox at that latitude.
Since I’m going alone it is my intention to spend the mornings reading, a poetry collection per day is the plan, and spend afternoons and evenings exploring and relaxing and might pop in to the local hamman.
I may write. How can I not write something, as Barthes once said, the writer on holiday is a myth. From the widely available Mythologies by Roland Barthes. I recommend it’s highly entertaining and thought provoking.
So where is the light in our poetry world as the days lengthen and the nights get shorter?
OUT NOW
The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan
Release date: March 12th from Ecco Press
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma, addiction, and cross-cultural behavior. Her writing covers aspects of identity and the effects of displacement, particularly within the Palestinian diaspora. She is the author of The Arsonists’ City and The Twenty-Ninth Year. Published by Harper Collins. The author describes the book as follows,
“This new collection of poetry that traces the fragmentation of memory, archive, and family-past, present, future-in the face of displacement and war.
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection–a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form–small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.
These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body–and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?”
Available for preorder now
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-moon-that-turns-you-back-poems-hala-alyan/20165263
Soul Feast: a new anthology
Release date: March 21st from Bloodaxe Books who write
“Soul Feast is a companion anthology to Soul Food, offering up a further feast of thoughtful poems to stir the mind and feed the spirit, bringing hope and light in dark, uncertain times.
This book’s inspiration – Soul Food – achieved its wide popularity by word of mouth. For many thousands of readers feeling adrift in the early years of the 21st century, the poems in that book offered support and sustenance. What followed has been even more destructive and disorientating: wars, pandemic, oppression, persecution of peoples and minorities, mass migration, dishonest government, financial meltdown, and looming environmental catastrophe.
There are even more voices of hope and healing, of love and tolerance, kindness and compassion, sanity and solace, to be heard and felt in the poems of Soul Feast. This new compilation shows how poetry can help sustain our search for meaning in times of spiritual starvation. All these poems are universal illuminations of the meaning of life, speaking to readers of all faiths as well as to seekers and non-believers.
Drawn from many traditions, Soul Feast includes work by poets ranging from Lal Ded and Tukaram to Pessoa, Borges, Cummings and Langston Hughes, as well as poems by celebrated contemporary poets such as Ellen Bass, Imtiaz Dharker, Jane Hirshfield and Naomi Shihab Nye. This is a book to keep by the bedside or to keep with you when travelling.”
Available for preorder now.
COMING UP
The first weekend of March sees Glyn Maxwell’s play Boatman Town, A new version of Everyman, directed by Helen Eastman open in the U.K.
“Creation Theatre presents the world premiere of Glyn Maxwell’s Boatman Town. It is set in an English pub, so we are touring the production to the pubs of Oxfordshire and beyond. Pick from a variety of different locations, times and venues, and join us for a unique hour of theatre. If you can’t make it to the show in person, then you can book a ticket to watch a filmed version, which will be available for three days in March.”
Dates
Saturday 2 March, The Bar in The Barn Theatre, Welwyn Garden City, 8pm BOOK TICKETS
Sunday 3 March, The Bedford, Balham, London, 2pm BOOK TICKETS
Monday 4 March, The Bedford, Balham, London, 8pm BOOK TICKETS
Tuesday 5 March, The Bedford, Balham, London, 8pm BOOK TICKETS
Friday 8 March, James Street Tavern, Oxford, 7pm BOOK TICKETS
Saturday 9 March, James Street Tavern, Oxford, 2pm BOOK TICKETS & 6pm BOOK TICKETS
Sunday 10 March, James Street Tavern, Oxford, 2pm BOOK TICKETS & 6pm BOOK TICKETS
Live Canon write, “We are proud to have published Glyn Maxwell’s new play ‘Boatman Town, after Everyman’ and copies are now on sale here (£7): https://www.livecanon.co.uk/store/product/boatman-town-by-glyn-maxwell-after-the-summoning-of-everyman
You can read Glyn’s foreword to the play on our blog here
NURTURING YOUR PRACTICE
From Nine Arches Press
Poetry Spa at Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery – enjoy an inspiring day with poet Olga Dermott-Bond alongside regular Poetry Spa host, Roz Goddard.
A copy of Frieze by Olga Dermott-Bond is part of the ticket price and prepare for friendly discussion, absorption in poetry and a creative writing workshop.
The day starts with gently reading. Then a small group of other book lovers people to experience the benefits of focused reading in Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery (the venue is an 12 minute walk from Nuneaton station and has nearby car parking in Riversley Park or on Clinic Road).
Whatever you get up to this month, do what you love and love what you do. We can find happiness and contentment in the time of climate emergency and multiple crises. Enjoy!
A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
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