News
I came back from a couple of weeks away to find the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society journal – Folio 65 – waiting for me, with the judges report from this year’s open competition, including on my winning poem, ‘Sky Falling’.
This is what the judge, Jo Shapcott, had to say about it:
‘[Sky, falling’] was a poem that stood out for the reach of the imagination, and the power of the language and the poet’s willingness to let the poem open to the sky. Calvino, in Six Memos for the Next Millenium, says: “Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarified consistency.” This is description which could have been made for ‘Sky, falling.’‘
Re-reading the other winners I’m again struck by what a strong selection there is there, and honoured to be part of it.
As for the rest of this poetry year, a few points stand out:
On April 2nd 2011 I read alongside Dannie Abse and Lynne Hjelmgaard at the Age Matters conference at Rydal Hall on Creativity, Ageing and Psychoanalysis
On March 19th, I found myself standing in for a missing Georgian poet during my annual trip to StAnza, reading alongside the insurpassable Rab Wilson in St. John’s Undercroft in St. Andrews.
On June 26th I read at The Jerwood Centre at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, as part of a symposium exploring the relationship between Wordsworth’s Sublime and Jung’s Numinous, following a hasty trip down to the Ashbourne Festival to shake a mayor’s hand, read a couple of poems, and pick up a prize. Two Dove Cottages in two days. Unlikely, but not impossible.