Warwick Words Festival

Just to let folks know I'll be reading some poems of mine at the Warwick Words Festival next weekend, on Saturday 7th October.

It won't be a lengthy reading as it takes place in the Thomas Oken Tea Rooms next to Warwick Castle and is part of the 'Poetry Cafe' which is running there throughout the Festival. If you're in or around Warwick next Saturday and would like to hear me read - and maybe stick around afterwards and say hi - then I'd be pleased to see you there.

The reading should take place between 1.30 - 2pm and is free, though their tea and scones probably won't be. There'll be other local poets performing or reading their work all that day and on Thursday and Friday too, if you're interested in coming along for the whole Festival.

For more information on all the other workshops and poetry/literary events available that weekend, try the Warwick Words website.

Who else should you be reading?

I have just, whilst trying to avoid writing my novel, found this great website at www.literature-map.com where you type in the name of a favourite author and the website will instantly generate the names of other authors read by people who like that author's books. It sounds a little dull, put like that - it's not, damn it! - but just go and try.

Personally, I think it's rather cool, especially the way the names sort of starburst and jiggle about on the page as they spread further and further away from the original named author. It's like a bomb going off and the bits flying everywhere. But in slow motion. And without hurting anyone. Hard to explain, better just go see what I mean - here's the link: www.literature-map.com.

I'm not listed by the way. Sob.

Autumn Launch dates for BOUDICCA & CO.

Here are some forthcoming performance dates for the autumn launch of BOUDICCA & CO., to be updated nearer the time. Please see the News page on my website for full details.

Copies of my new poetry collection BOUDICCA & CO. should be available at most of these events, but if you want one and can't make it to a reading, you can buy it online at a discount by visiting Salt Publishing.


Thursday 5th October NATIONAL POETRY DAY
Rugby Library
Afternoon Reading at Poetry Cafe, with Q&A session

Saturday 7th October
Warwick Festival
Lunchtime cafe reading, guest poet

Friday 13th October
Electric Cinema, Birmingham
Finale to the Birmingham Book Fair
& End of Laureateship Party
36 performers through to last 6

Sunday November 5th
Buzzwords, Cheltenham
Evening workshop
followed by guest poet slot with open mic

Date to be finalised (Saturday nights)
The Cellar, Poetry Society Cafe, London
Guest poet


MORE DATES TO FOLLOW SHORTLY.

First Day at School

My youngest started nursery school for the first time this week. She looks so cute in her little outfit - sparkling clean for once - and Bang-on-the-Door bag. (Which is apparently a lunch bag rather than a school bag proper, but I've never been terribly good at getting these minor details right. A bag is a bag is a bag, right?)

Anyway, here she is, never to be the same again, bursting with cuteness and first-day-at-schoolness. Those other kids won't know what hit them ...

The "Apples" Poem

I've been trying to place this poem of mine, entitled 'Apples", for over a year now. It takes months to get replies from most poetry magazines, of course, but all the same, I do love this particular poem and am really quite disappointed that none of the editors I tried took a shine to it. Though perhaps I like it too much and therefore can't see if or where it fails as a piece of writing. Or maybe the editors just weren't the right type for this poem. Whatever.

There is perhaps an air of late fifties and early sixties' nostalgia about this poem, as if it had come straight out of that era, and perhaps it did, in a way, with echoes of other famous poems about horses written about that time. It has an unusually gentle and domestic feel to it, which is rather out of step with many of the poems I've written over the past ten years.

Maybe I'm mellowing at last ...

Anyway, 'Apples" will be published soon enough in my new poetry collection, BOUDICCA & CO., due out from Salt in a few months' time - which basically means I can't submit it to a magazine now, with book publication so close at hand. So I'm posting the poem up here on my blog instead, with this photograph of last year's apples in my own back garden to accompany it.

Enjoy!

Apples

The horses come here for apples twice a day,
nudging the fence and rubbing themselves
against trees, trampling earth
with their hunters’ hooves while they wait.
At first we fed them with palms held flat,
away from the substantial teeth and those warm
brownish lips lifting up to reveal them.
But one always dropped his apple
into white-flowered nettles under the fence
and the other would stoop
to retrieve it, thick sinewy neck supple
as a giraffe’s. So now we roll them into the field
or throw them, over-arm, so they bounce
and split soft apple everywhere.
Some days the children are outside playing
and I lift them up, let the baby
grab at a sleek nose with her clumsy fingers
while the boys stare, mesmerised
by the moist brown eyes and those lashes -
like false ones! - seductively curling.
The gentler one comes on his own sometimes,
whinnying and snuffling at the fence.
He turns a wide circle under the horse-chestnut
before moving on, apples
just out of reach and no one in the garden.

Last of the Salad Days

It's nearly the end of the summer holidays, the weather is beginning to drift back into autumnal unpredictability, and I'm coming up to my hundredth post ... I can't believe I've been blogging on Raw Light for nearly a year now. Incroyable!

But at least this means I can stop nibbling on rabbit food every other meal and dig out the slow cooker for some nice thick warming stews. What a summer we had though, so blooming hot it was almost impossible to sleep some nights. And I only made it to a beach once, for one delicious hour, on a day trip down to Cornwall - all the way from the Midlands, can you credit it? - but it was worth the long drive just to listen to those waves rolling in and watch the gulls wheeling about overhead, making their mad gull noises. I'm not meant to live this far inland, even though I was born several hours' drive from the coast. It feels so unnatural, especially for a water sign, being constantly surrounded by earth and earth and yet more earth.

This is a photograph I took of my youngest daughter a year ago, on a trip to one of my spiritual homes (I have several) - the Isle of Man. Now this is what I call a beach ... known as the Ayres, a long isolated stretch of shore on the northernmost tip of the island, often deserted, about half a mile shy of the lighthouse.

Boudicca & Co.

Here's the cover of my new collection, BOUDICCA & CO., out in November from Salt Publishing. Hope it hits the bullseye ...

thought for Monday

"The race belongs not to the swift but to those who keep on going ..."

Who said that?

gecko tattoo

Should I get a tattoo? My eldest daughter has come to stay for the summer, as she has nowhere else to go while college is out, and though we have no room for her in the house - my other four children are all in residence, plus a visiting step-daughter - she's camping out in our back garden, pictured above. She's brought with her a small green gecko in the form of a tattoo on her wrist. Rather lovely, I thought.



Should I get one myself? Maybe not a gecko like hers, but perhaps a discreet little Scorpion on my upper arm or shoulder?

I hate pain though, such a coward ...

If you go down to the woods today ...

Just before the weather broke last week in a spectacular lightshow of lightning, thunder, and torrential rain - during which our inflatable paddling pool flew over the roof of our house into the road opposite - we took the kids for a walk in some very ancient woodlands about twenty minutes' drive from where we live in rural Warwickshire.

This particular area of woodland is called Old Nun Wood and is on the edge of a much larger and newer piece of woodland, but is itself extremely ancient and atmospheric, especially in those dark tense moments before a storm.


In we go ...






It seemed such a bright day when we set out, hot and sunny, the perfect day for walking in the shade of ancient woodlands.






Quite suddenly, the woods began to darken; here the gleam of fallen silver birches provides the only glimmer of light at ground level.






The first sinister rumbles of thunder are heard in the distance.





Time for a sharp exit, reaching the car only minutes before a violent downpour engulfed the Warwickshire countryside!

Not Dead, but in Hiding

I know it's been a long time since my last confession, folks, but hold onto your kidney bowls, pictures are coming soon of a lovely trip to the woods. Bears and all.

Blog-o-mania out of control!

In case people have been wondering why I so rarely update my Raw Light writing blog these days, I'm afraid it's not good news. I have over-stretched myself - every bit as painful as it sounds - and now have more time-consuming blogs to maintain than is healthy for my mental state. To prove this, here is a selection of the various online journals and resources I administer:

POETS ON FIRE daily listings

My Ancient Greek OU course blog

An irregular blog in memory of my mother, the popular novelist Charlotte Lamb

My local CE parish site, which I maintain for the church

To add to the above, I also have two other blogs under different pseudonyms, which I wish to keep anonymous for all sorts of dreadful and scandalous reasons, and I run a fun but infrequent blog for one of my four year old twin sons, who likes to make up his own poems and post them on the net, plus, of course, my Raw Light blog which you are currently reading.

I also run the POETS ON FIRE forum, which can't be left to run wild and needs daily attention, rather like a dog.

POETS ON FIRE FORUM

Is it any surprise I'm exhausted!?!

It's All Happening!

Boudicca & Co.

Yes, it's official, I now have my own author page at Salt Publishing and the new cover of my second collection Boudicca & Co. has finally been revealed to the public in all its Titian glory. Drum roll, please!

It really is a fun, sexy cover for a poetry book, everything I could have hoped for and more, and I'm very pleased with it indeed. The book itself is not due out for a few months yet, but there's some biog. and an interesting description of the book available online now, plus an extract and a recent photograph of me - which is unusual enough to merit a visit to the site, I think, since I usually try to hide behind pictures taken in my twenties!

Anyway, it's real, it's happening, and I'm very excited to be launching my second poetry collection with Salt.

Here's where you can find out more about Boudicca & Co. which is due out 1st November 2006.

"If you love your books, let them go" - The New York Times on the new global phenomenon of BookCrossing

This is Summersault, a cafe in the heart of Rugby, a market town in Warwickshire, whose chief claim to fame is that the game of rugby was invented there. I live within ten miles of Rugby, so visit the town frequently.

When we first moved to the area about three years ago, I checked out Rugby and was enchanted by this charming cafe with its outside tables, lavish flower displays and the arts & crafts materials and jewellery for sale inside the restaurant. It runs to three floors, with a lovely atrium-style top floor for those long winter afternoons, heavily planted with greenery and glowing with light. It's always marvellous to find a good place to write and it helps if the food - and especially the coffee - is excellent too.

But in recent months, Summersault has become even more special in my eyes. For it has joined a rapidly growing worldwide 'sociology experiment', as Book Magazine has dubbed it, and become an Official BookCrossing Zone.

Okay, you may be asking, what is BookCrossing? Well, basically it's about passing on your used books to other people for free. But anonymously, to complete strangers, instead of to friends and family. The three 'R's of BookCrossing are

Read it!
Register it!
Release it!

This is how the system works. You read a book, you visit www.bookcrossing.com and register that book, giving it a unique number which is attached either on the cover or on the inside cover, using your own book labels or one specially downloaded from the website, then you just release the book ... leave it on a park bench, on a cafe table, at a bus stop, in a church. When it's found, the person who takes it home with them will hopefully read the label, visit the bookcrossing site, and notify them that the book has been found. Then they read it, and release it again. Simple as that.

Naturally, it's NOT as simple as that. Many books are released into the wild, as it's called, and never heard of again. Very depressing for the releaser. But many are registered on the site as having been found, and are then passed on again, all over the world. Pretty neat idea!

To facilitate book exchanges, some places have been designated as BookCrossing Zones. And to come full circle, Summersault Cafe in Rugby is just such a place.

As you can see from this photo, the books are kept in a small bookcase near the door, with a sign explaining the process and letting people know that these particular books are FREE and can be taken home. You go in, browse the books, take one home, register it, read it, take it back and pass it on again.

I've just picked up a cookery book there today, a Dan Brown novel for one of my teenage daughters, and a couple of younger reader books for the kids. On the BookCrossing site you can find out if there's an Official BookCrossing Zone near you or who's registered on the scheme in your area, when the last books were released there and exactly where. This scheme is global, of course, so your books can travel anywhere and you will be notified by email when someone finds them, even if they end up in Peru! It's an amazing network of leads and book stories for you to follow and the BookCrossing worldwide discussion forum makes fascinating reading ...

Here's a link to the Bookcrossing site. Why not join them and register one of your books today, then release it ...

bookcrossing
n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

(added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

My Murky Past as a Secondhand Bookseller

The other day I came across some old photographs of my ill-fated secondhand bookshop venture in Camelford, North Cornwall, and decided to post them up on the blog, to share them with you. They made me come over all nostalgic for a moment, so I had to remind myself that I ploughed the last of my capital into this secondhand bookshop, launched it in 2002 with no business acumen or experience - and almost no advertising - and that it sank hopelessly into a pit of debt and despair before the first year was even up.

An old and sadly only too familiar tale for anyone who's ever been in business, I'm sure. But even reminding myself how I came to be so grindingly poor does not eradicate the little spark of nostalgia and fondness which leapt inside me as I viewed the photos of my old bookshop.



It really was a curiosity shop too, as you may be able to see from these photographs: strange prints on the wall, of nudes and who knows what else; a pair of elephant stools, hand-carved and painted; an exotic carved wooden wall-frieze; books sprawling everywhere, from cheap 60s & 70s 'Confessions of a Window-Cleaner' pulp fiction, to Modern Firsts of well-known twentieth-century poets, to antiquarian editions of Milton and Darwin; an impressive collection of occult literature - a local preacher came in one day and bought The Witch's Bible in order to burn it; an antique dark wooden settle for readers to relax on whilst browsing, and a large centrepiece table with an assortment of chairs for writing workshops and other social events.


Camelford was not ready for a bookshop, however. Rather like the bare platform in the poem 'Adlestrop', nobody came and nobody went for the first six months. A few local browsers would drop by in their lunch hour, engage me in idle talk, then disappear without parting with a penny. Once, a man in a weary-looking suit came in, poked around for a while, then smiled over the desk and told me that nobody reads books on the Cornish side of the Tamar. He was a bookseller from Devon.

One of my most serious problems was that I had little money for advertising, running a few poetry events instead to raise the shop's profile in the community, yet still failing to make enough in sales to cover the rent, rates and other outgoings. But I still maintain the shop failed because it was in too tough a location to draw regular custom - beyond the main body of the village, on a steep and dangerously busy hill, with almost no pavement. Even the Indian King Arts Centre, situated almost directly opposite, was struggling at the time and later closed down.

After I left, there was an art gallery there for a while. When we last drove past the shop, on holiday in Cornwall about a year ago, that too had gone.

Salt Publishing: new poetry collection for 2006

Great news! This week I signed with Salt Publishing in Cambridge for the publication of my second full-length collection of poetry, entitled Boudicca & Co., which is more or less ready to rock'n'roll and should be out on the shelves by late 2006. This is me pictured in Cambridge a few weeks ago with head honcho for the British side of operations at Salt Publishing, Chris Hamilton-Emery - whose poem 'Salt' I published in my magazine 'Blade' about ten years ago ...

As the title suggests, my second collection contains a long sequence of poems written in the voice of Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni, plus the best individual poems from the past nine years. Many of the poems included in this collection, however, were written over the past twelve months and reflect new changes in style and direction.

You can find my first poetry collection The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, on the Bloodaxe Books site.

As the launch date approaches, I shall keep you updated about readings, performances and one-legged spoon races. And if you'd like to book me for a poetry event either later this year or in 2007, you can find all the right information and contact details for that on my Jane Holland website.

My Mother and Other Romantic Novelists

My goodness, the days do pass quickly when you're meant to be keeping your blog updated on a regular basis, don't they?

Okay, I've got some FABULOUS news for you on the poetry front, but I am not yet able to reveal it in all its fabulousness, so you will have to wait just a few more days for that! Be patient, be strong, have another muffin ...

MEANWHILE, back at the ranch --- and it does feel like a ranch here at the moment, as Steve's not been able to get out to mow the lawn for a few days - preparations for Ofsted inspections at his school! - and the grass has grown almost to thigh-level in some parts of our garden, waving beautifully in the breeze with leggy buttercups and graceful seeded grassheads under the apple tree --- MEANWHILE, I have been extremely busy creating a brand-new blog.

Groan, not another blog!?

Yes, for I have bloggy fingers and am unable to prevent myself from creating new blogs almost every month. But this time it's all in a good cause, for I have created a blog in memory of my dear mama, whose writing name was Charlotte Lamb and who wrote over 150 novels, most of them romances, but some historical novels and a few big thrillers in there too, and who died in October 2000.

I miss my mother dreadfully most days, as she doted on her two granddaughters Katie and Becky, and very tragically died before she could meet her other three grandchildren, my twin sons Morris and Dylan and my youngest daughter Indigo. So almost every day my kids do these odd amusing little things and I say to them 'Your grandma would have loved that!' and I show them her photo and tell them about her. Which makes it hard to forget ...

I don't have much material to do with my mother, alas, not even many photos, as my siblings and father have most of that sort of thing. But I do have copies of nearly all of her M&B romances and some of the thrillers and historicals, so I shall be posting up information about them, and about re-releases of her books in places like Australia, where she's still a very popular author, and some new graphic novels that have been made using her stories, and other titbits either about my mother or about romance in general.

If that sounds like your sort of thing, or even if you're just a little bit curious about my mother and her work, do please come and see what I've been up to at charlottelamb.blogspot.com.

We're going to the Zoo, the Zoo, the Zoo ...

For those who believe I do nothing but sit in front of a computer screen all day, here are some photos of my recent trip, with the kids, to Whipsnade Zoo just north of London. If you're planning to go there yourself, go early in the day and expect to spend a long time there. We were there nearly five hours and saw maybe a third of what was going on there.

If you can afford the parking actually within the Zoo complex, go for it (about £12!), otherwise wear sturdy walking shoes, take a buggy for the kids and plenty of water/umbrella shade and/or sunhats if it's a hot day. Whipsnade is a very LARGE place ...


The boys trying to get up close and personal with the big fellas





I did mean to bring extra wipes ...





The closest any human has ever been to this particular species






Indigo in her natural habitat

Pure & Good & Right

This week I was at an Open Mic poetry night in Leamington Spa - PUREandGOODandRIGHT - which is held in a very chic bar-restaurant on Warwick Street called TOYK. Sean Kelly is the promoter and MC, a man famous for his poem about penguins and his song about Spiderman - if you ever meet Sean, get him to do the Spiderman song for you, it's genuinely hilarious and deserves to be aired on national television - and he was in fine form this evening, managing not to introduce me as a snooker player (unlike last time) and even forgiving me for hitting him in the face with the microphone. (An accident, I should add. I'd have hit him a lot harder if I'd intended to.)

Like the first PUREandGOODandRIGHT it was a star-studded evening, a sort of 'Who's Who' of West Midlands poets.

We had Julie Boden, former Birmingham Poet Laureate, though she was being part of the audience for once rather than shaking her booty at the mic. Dreadlockalien - aka Richard Grant - current Birmingham Poet Laureate, was also there, giving us his honey-tongued 'I wanna hear poetry' vibe. (Yes, mellifluous.) Plus Andy Conner, one of the 'Six of the Best' artistes from this month at the Birmingham Library Theatre, who gave us more of his long poems from memory - an impressive talent for memorising, this guy, and a quirky style of delivery.

To my great pleasure Roy McFarlane, gifted performance poet from Wolverhampton and a central member of the New October Poets, gave us an excellent ten minute set after the interval; ignore the quiet unassuming manners of this very polite man, Roy McFarlane is one of the most talented and politically motivated poets I've heard in the West Midlands and deserves to be more widely known in the UK. Then there was Jus B, a new talent and smooth groover from somewhere round the Birmingham area - didn't quite catch where - who laid it all on the line for us. Several new faces too tonight - new to me, that is - including Sue and Cherie, both of them very confident and impressive.

Oh, and I did a short set myself, and was accused afterwards of not reading any 'rude' poems. I thought I'd gone too far last time with my rudery so chose a slightly tamer selection this month, thinking the older members of the audience would appreciate the gesture. Shows how wrong you can be.

I will be MCing this Leamington open mic night myself on July 17th, while Sean Kelly is away on his hols, which is something I'm looking forward to, in spite of the ribbing I know I'll get at the hands of dear Dread & Co. I'm just arranging a few guest poets at the moment, so watch this space for further details.

I can highly recommend PUREandGOODandRIGHT if you live anywhere in the West Midlands; the restaurant and bar are excellent, the clientele appear to be well-hooved young professionals who are quite happy to listen to a spot of live poetry whilst unwinding with a large glass of Chardonnay, and the atmosphere is intimate, friendly and encouraging to new performers.

The next PUREandGOODandRIGHT will be held on Monday 19th June at 7.30pm. TOYK, Warwick Street, Leamington Spa.

Poetic Ducks and Drakes under Fire

I'm afraid a predator - probably a fox - came in the night a few days ago and did for those poor duck eggs in our back garden. We think the duck got away. The nest itself was decimated but no sign of duck feathers, so hopefully she lives to lay another clutch even though her unfortunate offspring perished before they could be hatched. So that's the end of that. But here are the first few eggs which I managed to capture on camera before their sad demise ...


Talking off the tribulations of sitting ducks, we've been having a humdinger of a fight in recent weeks on the Poem forum on the contentious issue of sexism in British and Irish poetry.

Needless to say, I am on the team which believes sexism still exists, and sometimes in spadefuls ... it's just a little more subtle now than when it was not punishable by public beheading. But the opposing team - all men, except for one woman - mostly believe it's outdated and unfashionable to see sexism at work in contemporary poetry, some even claiming it doesn't exist at all and that we must be hysterical feminists with chips on our shoulders about men - and the rest - to claim something so ludicrous as women being discriminated against in the dear old liberal utopia of British poetry.

Clearly nettled by our arguments, one well-known male poet cited a recent anthology by a major editor to demonstrate that person's lack of sexism. Another gentleman - on our team or perhaps just acting as a referee - quietly pointed out that 135 of the post-1945 poems in that anthology were by men. Only 16 were by women.

Hmmm ...




So here are some sitting ducks to accompany that topic, all of them poets and female, being treated with dinner by the Heaventree Press - the out-of-focus guys at the far end of the table - before performing at the Herbert Gallery in Coventry last month, to celebrate International Women's Day. That's a major poet Pascale Petit there with her eyes rather unfortunately closed, Kimberley Trusty opposite laughing, I think that might possibly be Helen Ivory beyond Kim with all the flowing golden hair, and we also had Esther Morgan, Zoe Brigley and of course myself, Jane Holland, hidden behind the camera as usual. The event went down very well, the large gallery was packed with standing room only within minutes of the start, and Jenny Ousbey was the compere. Excellent stuff.

However, although I believe expenses were paid for some who had travelled a long way, dinner seemed to be the main fee. Certainly that was all I got for performing that night. It was a very nice dinner in a lovely Coventry restuarant called Brown's, but cash would have been even nicer. Would that have been the case with a reading of six reasonably well-known male poets?

Somehow I doubt it ...