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 ...

New 'Live Poetry' Discussion Forum - have you joined yet?

Oh yes, there are yet more Jane Holland projects in the mix this month ...

If you've been wondering why I haven't been posting as regularly as usual on Raw Light - and I'm sure you have! - here's the reason; a few weeks back, I launched a new discussion forum for UK poets who are into performance and spoken word, and it's been eating all my spare time since then.

This new discussion forum is a place where performers and poets can exchange views, make friends, advertise new or regular gigs, open mic nights and festival performances, see what's on in live poetry right across the UK on a daily basis, play quizz games, and generally network. Naturally, it's taken a fair amount of time to get the forum up and running, and encourage people to register as members and begin posting new topics for discussion, so I haven't been able to keep posting to this blog as often as I'd like.

Anyway, you can visit my new 'live poetry' discussion forum here - POETS ON FIRE FORUM - and why not become a member, while you're there? (Hint, hint!) It's all completely free, and takes less than 3 minutes to register a username and start posting.

Maybe see you there?


Here I am on stage at the Birmingham Library Theatre last week:

"First performed on stage at the age of three ..."

Here's my three year old son Dylan, checking the microphone before my SIX OF THE BEST performance last week, who got up on the stage of the Birmingham Library Theatre as one of the warm-up acts and recited the opening stanza of John Masefield's famous poem 'Sea Fever' to an audience of nearly 100 people.

Now there's something unusual to tell the other kids at nursery!

Charade Project: Friday 28th April 2 - 5pm

Is this the end of the age of the book?

On Friday 28 April, between 2pm and 5pm, a group of people will congregate in Birmingham's Victoria Square to recite their chosen song, play or novel while wandering together, as a conscious re-creation of the final scenes of Truffaut's adaptation of Bradbury’s novel, 'Fahrenheit 451'.

Charade is a work by artist Simon Pope which mirrors the futuristic 1950s novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’ where Ray Bradbury writes of an age when books are illegal and screen based media dominates society. The role of the fire service is no longer to extinguish but to start fires and to burn the books it finds.

Since January 2006 Charade has recruited participants from the West Midlands to save their most cherished piece of media history. Through a series of open workshops and online communities the volunteers have been assisted through a process of memorising and internalising their chosen item, working towards a final event in Birmingham’s city centre.

It's not too late for you to join in. Register online at Charade or tell us on the day.

Charade has been jointly commissioned by BBC and ACE as part of ‘Private View’ a programme to demonstrate “outstanding innovation and vision from visual artists experimenting with live technologies in the public realm”.

You can visit Charade to follow new developments online.

I will be taking part this Friday afternoon in Birmingham's Victoria Square, having memorised some scenes from King Lear - rather imperfectly, I'm afraid, but perhaps that's part of the project, how each person must reinterpret memorised works of literature or art because of their different ways of remembering them.

A Duck in the Catmint

In spite of an absence of water, this little duck has built her nest right under our noses, a few yards from the back door in our garden, in a dried old clump of last year's catmint. Her mate, we fear, was the drake last seen dead at the side of the road a week or so ago. So she's all alone in the world but ignoring our tentative efforts at help - apart from nibbling on some bread - with a quiet warning hiss whenever we get too close.

When I first put down a frying pan of water, in the hope that she might drink a little, she was scared enough to leap up from the nest and reveal eight or nine large blueish-white eggs keeping warm there. Beautiful. But our biggest fear is that a fox or wild cat may find her unprotected one night and devour the eggs, or the poor little ducklings when they eventually hatch out.

She might have done better nesting by the village pond about a mile down the road, next to water and clustered with good hiding places for young ducklings, but for some reason she chose our isolated house in the middle of rolling sheep fields to hatch this year's brood. Perhaps there are too many cats in the village now, or maybe this is a territory issue and some other more combative duck has taken the best nesting spot by the pond ...

Lovely, isn't she?

Woods etc., Rejection, and Elementals

I feel dreadful because I've been so busy posting on my POETS ON FIRE blog that I haven't been posting here on RAW LIGHT. This is not very good and accordingly I shall make amends by writing the following:

a.) Having finally got hold of a copy of Alice Oswald's Woods etc., I've been reading it with, at first, incredulity and, after a while, great interest. Although it seems at first glance like a collection containing all the usual suspects - stone, river, moon, stars, woods etc. - this book actually indicates a huge progression by Oswald as she swings even further along the line Hughes was beginning to take in his later 'nature' books, for want of a better description, such as Cave Birds and River, both of them marvellous books which slipped restlessly and ambitiously away from the mainstream wherever possible. It's a line I suppose could be described in places as working within the modernist or avant-garde traditions, but which in strong and rather eccentric hands like those of Hughes and Oswald becomes something uncategorisable. I wasn't sure of it, as I said before, at first, but then I think you get used to the voice and begin to trust it, allowing Oswald to lead you into darker and less obvious waters where you - or at least I - can see new possibilities for language and old possibilities given a new twist.

There are moments in Oswald's latest book when I want to kick her - a slavish homage to Hughes' Wodwo, for instance, which seems to add nothing new and should never really have got past the editor - but there are other moments, too numerous to mention, when I was fascinated enough to want to stop reading Oswald's poems and start writing something of my own. And when that happens, you know this has to be the real thing - poetry.

Perhaps that's the real test of poetry; not Astley's hairs rising on the back of his neck, or Schmidt cutting himself shaving, but a restless urge to write, to test yourself against that reaction, to go one better. That's certainly how Harold Bloom would see it ... if you believe in that sort of thing.

b.) After a silence of nearly five years, my work has at last appeared again in the pages of a poetry magazine - this quarter's issue of Poetry Review, in fact, just published this week. This five year absence from publication was due to a combination of writer's block - which seemed at the time more like writer's death than block - and an abrupt failure of nerve, which went hand in hand with the block and effectively prevented me from submitting even previously written work to poetry magazines. The poem that's just appeared in Poetry Review is a direct response poem to a magazine rejection - 'Deciphering the Rejection Letter' - which is sort of ironic, I know, but it does make me feel better to know I've finally broken the silence.

c.) And to finish off this blog entry, and make up for so many days of not bothering to post, here is a four poem sequence of mine, inspired by the elements and published in the excellent poetry magazine Acumen back in the late 90s:

ELEMENTALS

1

West Kennett Long Barrow


Stone womb under an earth belly
too ancient for light.

Rain condenses its euphoric mass
to a single blessing

filtering through
the intestinal silence of rock.

Flies cling
to the mossed edge of a crevice.

She devours their small bodies like offerings.

Once, she could hold her face
up to the moon, watch it

screwing a thin silver bolt
through the deadeye.

Now she eats beetles
and hunts with the night-train

passing the lit windows of women
anxious for conception.





II

Almost Iceland


The house was a standing stone
on the edge of annihilation.

It sat there uncomplaining
while acres of wind

pummelled and rattled windows
and floorboards.

The sea birds shunned it. The bees
rarely came so far north.

The sheep called out to it to move
but it didn’t.

It just sat there.

Its single chimney grinned up at the sky
like a maniac.

For miles around, whole islands lay down
and withered. Stones

stunted themselves in its shadow.
And always the wind

hammering for the house
to be absent.

Finally, its inhabitants packed up
and left.

The house remained,
folding its arms and gritting black teeth.

It had no intention of surrender.

The wind blew on
battering its ram’s head repeatedly

against lintels and uprights

its high battle-cry
prising tiles from the roof

imploding
the senseless resistance of doorways.





III

Holy Island


Pausing
after the genuflection of causeway

salt water puckers a scar
the width of her belly

creased abdomen
folding a damp cloth into sand dunes.

Whatever she gave birth to
dragged itself beyond these coarse grasses

then sloped into wind-blear

turning its back
irascibly on civilisation.

Yet the marks remain. Twice a day
they etch themselves out

along the chevroned gold
of a mackerel stomach.

The sea staggers across here on stilts

ridiculous headdress bouncing
and swaying

exhausted by cold
yet making the pilgrimage.

After it kneels and kisses the earth
sacred light flattens sand

to a blind haze
magnetised by the crawling bodies of cars.

Bare steel hulks
dredging the sun-dust

hump-hump-hump themselves

over her consecrated skein
of striations.




IV

The Stone Henge


A perfect ice-rimmed crucible
tilts itself

against the first geometry of stars.

Vast scalded pockets of fire
empty themselves

through miraculous peepholes.

Obsidian heaven
volcanised light to this glittering sacrament

that drilled ancient fires
through the eye

suggesting bears and archers

the twin shafts
of a ceaseless plough.

Now a wind-blackened cauldron
pitches its song

through these wide openings
to weather

each isolated furnace
linked

by the furious tweak
of identification

the hot craned neck of naming.

At the Lighthouse - a retrospective

The poem below, At the Lighthouse, was written about six years ago and is about the break-up of a long-term relationship which affected me very deeply. (It wasn't written until about six months after the event, of course, since it's always hard in the immediate aftermath of such things to get them clear enough in your head to make reasonable poetry with them.)

I'm not sure this is a particularly good poem though, but I do think it was a necessary thing for me to write, something which moved me on stylistically as well as emotionally. To explain that remark, I wrote a few more in this vein around that time - half-bitter, half-nostalgic, after-the-break-up retrospectives - then left them behind, hopefully for good. I've never been very good at 'personal' poetry. I prefer to look at larger themes in my poems, to at least touch on the bigger picture where possible, and this constant narrowing things down to personal specifics, to the mundane, seems to give my work a sort of cloyingly 'fashionable' self-awareness which I dislike.

Not that I like an utterly abstract approach either, the cold clear line of some postmodernist poetry, or the deliberate intricacies and complexities and lateral jump cuts of some avant-garde work. I suppose the poems I like best - of my own - tend to be a bit on the simple side. Overly simplistic, some might say. But not this poem, At the Lighthouse; this is more superficial than simple, I think, whilst not wishing to be too harsh on myself, this poem having been written at a time of great personal despair - hard to believe now, on the far side of it - when poems were wrung from me only with immense difficulty. And soon after, indeed, I stopped writing poetry altogether for several years.

For those who might be curious, the poem is set in the South of France, where we used to holiday together most summers. To be even more precise about the location, it's actually the lighthouse above Cap d'Antibes. To get there, you have to navigate these narrow winding dusty lanes, what the French call 'lacets' as I recall, meaning tight bends like shoelaces. And at night, this powerful beam of light sweeps the Cap, crowded with red-roofed private villas and swimming pools, and the glittering bay below. Marvellous when taking an evening swim, to lie back in the black water and wait for that beam to sweep across the Cap. I've actually managed to find a few daytime shots of the lighthouse and views of the bay online, which you can hopefully see by clicking here, if interested.

In spite of my reservations, there are little touches I like in this poem - the opening image of pine trees envisaged as 'bald old men', the atmospheric dust, the quasi-religious overtones long in advance of my own brush with organised boredom, the silver fish of the bay seen from a distance and at height, and lastly - my own twinge of nostalgia, probably only audible to myself - the cigarette, also described in another poem of this period, entitled 'It was cool inside the chapel', as 'your ubiquitous cigarette'. I was a chain-smoker too, don't get me wrong. But cigarettes - and booze, actually - were a major part of that relationship, over eight long destructive years, and since I'm now a smoke-free zone, the mere mention of a cigarette, in the right context, can flash me, both uncomfortably and with affectionate regret, back to that time ...



At the Lighthouse

Its cold steel eye swung
to dust our heads
below the scruffy creak of pines,
bald old men staring
at the black line
of the Mediterranean.
There was always dust there;
dust in our lungs
and in rope sandals.
We climbed the tilting path
to the lighthouse,
glanced in through the porthole
of the chapel.
From the viewing platform
at two francs a time
the bay was no longer
a silver fish
landed on its side.
You moved off into the dark,
the glowing target
of your cigarette
something to lock onto,
burning the retina.
I should have kept you
shadowy, elusive
as those fairy lights heaving
a half-moon bay.
But we had only months
before we fell apart,
swivelling the lens
to face our hinterland,
each trap at last
revealing what it was,
thick swimming dust
fused in the glare
of that cold steel eye.



This poem was first published in Poetry Review.

Listen with Holland

I've been a busy girl over the past week or so, and one of the things I've been doing is enabling people to listen to my poems online.

Along the way, I've discovered that it's quite a complicated process to load audio files onto websites and blogs, especially if you live in the UK instead of the United States - Blogger does a free down-the-phone Audioblogging service in the States, for instance, which you have to pay for in call charges if ringing from outside the USA - so this has not been easy.

However, I found a way round those problems by thinking laterally. I recently got hold of an MP3 recorder and, whilst the sound quality is not brilliant, have now managed to record a handful of performance-friendly poems and load them onto a free Sound & Image website called Putfile.

So if you like the idea of hearing my poems rather than just seeing them in print, you can now check out the ones I've loaded so far by clicking www.putfile.com/janeholland.

Be warned though, if you visit the site, that the volume is quite loud on some of the audio files, so do check it before the file starts playing - there's usually a short window of 5 - 10 secs while it loads during which you can lower the volume.

It's just poems being 'read out' at the moment - which is never ideal - but I have several gigs coming up over the next month or so, and will be taking along my trusty MP3 recorder to see what sort of quality of recording I can get from a live poetry reading in front of an audience.

Here's that link again: www.putfile.com/janeholland

Memorabilia

Found this photograph, taken by Simon Norfolk in about 1996-7, amongst some old papers of mine from my snooker-playing days and decided to post it up too, since I've been blogging recently about snooker and my disreputable past. Odd how the sight of that cue - a beautiful Canon Whirlwind, which is now safely stowed away in an aluminium case and leaning in a corner of my house somewhere- makes me want to play again. My fingers twitch for the baize just looking at it. But that way madness lies ...



Such glorious earrings too. I wonder whatever happened to them?

The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman

I had a hot flush today and decided to post up another old poem, give it a public airing. This time, to temper the rather avant-garde nature of my Umbra pieces - see archived posts for January 2006 - I've decided to post up the title poem of my first collection, 'The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman', which is a long poem about snooker and deals with how I started playing, the progression of my career in the game, and my eventual ban.

If you don't know the story, in 1995, I was banned for life from playing snooker by my local governing body - NOT the World Ladies Billiards and Snooker Association - for allegedly 'bringing the game into disrepute'. I was offered the chance to apologise for various comments I had made in the press about corrupt officials, in return for the ban being lifted.

I refused, and stopped playing competitively soon after that. At the time, I was ranked 24th in the world for women's snooker.

To accompany the poem, there's a photograph below of me practising for the 1992 Women's World Snooker Championships.



The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman

It starts here
as a table
in a small back room;

a busy pub, a sideways look,
the girls all cheering
when I drop the black,

a moment in between the kids,
a breath of silence slow
but true

across a table
in a small back room –
saying yes for once, not no.

Like Lazarus, I walk
from sleep, still stripping off
the winding sheet,

and take a cue from the rack
at the back of the club,
into the darkness

like a somnambulant.
Here hatred
breeds in corners at my step

and whispers fall
like evening
through these hanging lamps,

these gold-fringed shades.
The cloth is a lawn
to lay my head on, listening

to the beat of earth. They stare
from bar-stools, stalk me.
The men close ranks;

their shields reflect
like mirrors
as I clear the slate.

I am unwelcome here.
The door is there, they say,
and take the time to show me out.




But I am back again tomorrow,
sliding the new cue
like a blade from its sheath.

They cannot shut me out.
I have a right, a claim to stake
across this battlefield,

this bed of slate.
Their smiles are baited,
locked in place

until their silence is a war
that I seek out,
no choice of arms.

I play the men.
I lose.
And then I lose again.

I learn to stroke the ball away –
to catch the centre
when I can,

to find that timing
when the going’s sweet,
the baize is running like a race-horse

and the bets are down.
To take the risks
and never cheat.

I watch the best,
mesmerised as body
moves to wrist,

wrist falls to hand,
this silent discipline
of heart and mind.

I hammer home
each lesson
like a goldsmith,

working a delicate grip
into the hit,
the pendulum arm true

as a perfect right-angle
when the cue
goes through.

I start to win;
short sharp burst
of pure adrenalin.

I learn to dodge
those empty shafts of sunlight
in the club

when a woman
who walks alone
through rows

and rows of tables
dares to call them home.
Then others come.

They walk in,
taking the dust-covers
from the baize

with an awkward hand,
learning the touch of the cloth,
the deep furrow

left by a still hand,
fingers spread like a starfish.
First we are two,

then three, then four.
I pull them in from businesses,
supermarket queues,

from raising kids, from streets,
from empty doorways,
darkened rooms.

Together
we are stronger.
We take a name for ourselves

and make it ring.
We play
each competition

in the spirit of the game –
a name engraved
in silver on a cup.

Retribution comes
not from games on baize
but changing truths

to fit the end, till nothing’s
what it seems. And in their lies
I recognise revenge.

I’ll not give them what they want ¬–
a public apology.
This ban is straight and true.

What started as a sideways look
will run for life,
for disrepute.



First published in SNOOKER SCENE and subsequently THE BRIEF HISTORY OF A DISREPUTABLE WOMAN (Bloodaxe 1997). For more on my first poetry collection, click here.

The CHARADE project, Birmingham

One fascinating project I'm involved with at the moment is CHARADE, a project commissioned jointly by the BBC and Arts Council England from international artist Simon Pope and managed by Capital Arts Project in Birmingham. It forms part of 'Private View', a programme to demonstrate "outstanding innovation and vision from visual artists experimenting with live techniques in the public realm" and involves participants in public performance, video diaries, MP3 recordings of their work, plus opportunities to meet other volunteers and share insights.

Basically, you each pick a piece of popular culture - our most cherished books, films, plays, music, TV and radio programmes - and 'become' that item by interiorising it. After participating in workshops and online communities and using other resources to aid the process of memorisation and identification, CHARADE volunteers will then perform their chosen piece in Birmingham city centre at the end of April, wandering about together in the open air in "a conscious re-creation of the final scenes of Truffaut's adaptation of Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451."

"Charade mirrors the key premise of Fahrenheit 451, that rather than providing stable conditions for the storage and retrieval of knowledge, our computer networks become troubled, precarious; the fear of data-corruption forces us to go beyond our electronic systems and we focus back towards the body, the possibility and ability of our memories."

My chosen item is King Lear. An ambitious choice, perhaps, especially since one of the other participants has picked a short definition from the Oxford English Dictionary as her chosen item! But I'm only memorising a few scenes which are of special interest to me.

One of them is Act II, Scene ii, a scene in which the disguised Kent - unjustly banished by Lear earlier in the play yet still doggedly loyal to his old master - encounters Oswald, the cowardly and sychophantic steward of Lear's treacherous daughter, Gonerill. They argue, Kent attempts to fight Oswald, and ends up being put in the stocks by the Duke of Cornwall as a trouble-maker.

This short scene appeals to me on several levels. Firstly, I admire Kent's integrity and the blunt but clear-sighted way he deals with even the most complex emotional situations. 'Let me still remain/ the true blank of thine eye,' he begs the king just before being sent into exile, and later continues to serve Lear in disguise. Secondly, the glorious riot of language in this scene appeals to my love of words. In this scene, Kent famously berates the bewildered Oswald in a long series of breathlessly imaginative insults - a cascade of Shakespearean invective - 'Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!' being one of my personal favourites.

I'm still deciding which other scene from King Lear to memorise. I think a choice of two would be a good idea at this stage, perhaps deciding on the final one nearer the 28th April, which is our performance date for CHARADE. I think there's still time to register as a participant if you would like to get involved. You can email the producers at info@charade.org.uk or call 08709 316 834.

[If browsing this post as an individual page, the main RAW LIGHT site can be found here.]

International Women's Day reading

This was the line-up at Tuesday night's poetry reading at the Herbert Gallery in Coventry, celebrating International Women's Day. From right to left: Kim Trusty, Jane Holland, Pascale Petit, Zoe Brigley, Helen Ivory and Esther Morgan. And I'd just like to say that's water in those glasses on the table. Mainly water.

Kim Trusty is a well-known international performance poet, now living in Birmingham; she read a mixture of old and new pieces in her inimitable style, poems of personal and social commentary, and managed to pack a real punch in the ten minute slot each poet had been alloted.

I was up next and read one poem called 'Sleep' from my first collection 'The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman', published by Bloodaxe, followed by a selection of more recently written poems and three pieces from a long sequence of poems about the life and death of Boudicca, a work I am still developing.

Pascale Petit, one of the Next Generation Poets, read last in the first half of the event. Both her first collection from Seren, 'The Zoo Father', and her latest book 'The Huntress' were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her poems are powerful and visceral, dealing with her problematic relationship with both parents. Gifted with a highly individual voice, Pascale plans to focus on developing her career as a poet now she has left Poetry London, which she edited from 1989-2005.





In the second half, Welsh poet Zoe Brigley took us into new territory, bravely using music to underscore some of her poetry, with the help of an accompanying musician and her own drumming. Zoe teaches at Warwick University and you can read her interesting teaching blog with useful poetry links here.

Helen Ivory is a Bloodaxe poet. Although published when she was still quite young, her first collection 'The Double Life of Clocks' won critical acclaim, and her newly published second collection, 'The Dog in the Sky' seems to have followed in its footsteps. She entertained the audience with technically accomplished poems of personal experience, filled with wry anecdotal humour. You can read more about her here.

In the unenviable position of having to read last, Esther Morgan nevertheless demonstrated why her poetry has brought her considerable attention. She has two full-length collections out with Bloodaxe, her first 'Beyond Calling Distances' and now 'The Silence Living in Houses'. This last book is themed around ghosts and absences and possesses a strong a sense of history; the poems she chose to read had a strong narrative drive, well-written and intriguing. You can find out more about Esther Morgan on the Bloodaxe website here.

This was a superb Coventry event held right in the city centre, and organised with the collaboration of various parties including the Heaventree Press and the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. The venue was packed out, in spite of the bad weather, and I hope there will be more Coventry events like this in the future.

If you're interested in live poetry events like this, click here to visit my other site listing poetry in performance and readings across the UK, Poets On Fire.

in memoriam Martin Blyth

'Once it was dubbed the new rock’n’roll, complete with youngish New Generation Poets who were going to put it right back in the spotlight. Now it’s being called the new Prozac, following research into its power to improve mental health and wean patients off mind-altering drugs. Then Daisy Goodwin, queen of the coffee-table anthology, caused a stir by suggesting that it was dying, and would become as quaint as Morris dancing.

There is a common thread to most of these comparisons. They seek to depict poetry in terms of something quite ephemeral. Poetry is much older than Prozac or rock’n’roll. It has survived for at least 4,000 years as an art form in its own right, and on its own terms.'

That's the final entry the late Martin Blyth posted up on his own instructive and eclectic poetry website.

An experienced poet and writer, part of the team for the poetry magazine SOUTH, perceptive journalist, fount of wisdom, family man and good-natured all-rounder, Martin died on the 23rd February. Although we had been in contact on and off by snail-mail and email for some years, I only met Martin for the first time at last year's Torbay Festival. I think I still owe him a drink. He will be sadly missed.

Examples of Martin's poetry can also be found on laurahird.com.

WOMEN POETS SHOWCASE in Coventry

It's always nice to do a 'proper' reading in your local area, especially in a town where you often perform at open mic events or in other informal situations, so it's a real pleasure to be reading in Coventry this week alongside Pascale Petit, Esther Morgan, Helen Ivory etc - see below for the full list - in an ambitious 'Women Poets Showcase' put together by the up-and-coming Heaventree Press, based in Coventry, who publish poetry collections and the poetry/arts magazine Avocado.


WOMEN POETS SHOWCASE
Tuesday 7th March

Featuring readings by several noted female poets, to celebrate
International Women's Day.

Reading at the event:
Esther Morgan, Jane Holland, Pascale Petit, Helen Ivory, Zoe Brigley, Kim Trusty, Jenny Ousbey.

7 - 9pm
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum,
Jordans Well, Coventry City Centre.
Free.
Refreshments provided.

An excellent day all round

I've just come back from the Burn FM interview - Birmingham University's very own radio station - and it was really fun, I enjoyed it immensely - no nerves this time, or so few that after a few minutes of chat on air with the lovely Tim and Naomi I felt relaxed enough to start putting on funny voices and doing my Elvis Presley impersonation. No, seriously, it was a great interview and I'm delighted they asked me on. If you like radio, you don't need to be in the immediate vicinity of the university to listen to Burn FM. Wherever you are in the world, you can listen live by clicking here. Their poetry and spoken word show is on between 3 and 5pm on Thursday and Friday afternoons.

Plus, when I got home today, I found a very encouraging email waiting for me from an editor, giving me the green light on some work I submitted a few weeks ago. So it's been an excellent day all round!

Burn FM, Birmingham University's radio station

I'll be doing some more live radio this Friday - the ultimate adrenalin-pumper! - here in the Midlands. If you can pick up the station and would like to hear some of my poetry on air, do tune in. 'Burn FM', Birmingham University's radio station, has invited me to come in and chat about my poetry career, plus what's going on with poetry in the Midlands. I'll also be reading some of my new poems.

I always get nervous before doing live radio, imagining I'll dry up or make some dreadful faux-pas on air. But then I find it so friendly and intimate once in the studio, I quite forget I'm speaking to anyone but the person interviewing me, and breeze straight through it. I find stage performances nerve-racking too - not healthy for someone who does so much stand-up! - but live radio is probably the worst for me, in terms of sheer fright five or ten minutes beforehand.

My old drama teacher, the infamous Colleen McHarrie, now sadly no longer with us, always used to say that you could only perform to the best of your ability if you felt as sick as a parrot before going on. So I should be okay ...

I'll be on Burn FM on Friday 24th February, from about 3pm onwards.

the good news about morris

We had some great news today about one of my twin sons, pictured below. Morris has been undergoing a series of regular hospital assessments for the past eighteen months, trying to discover if the various developmental problems he suffers from are related to autism.

We had the last in a long round of consultations today, and finally got the all-clear from the hospital; in the team's opinion, Morris is not suffering from an Autistic Spectrum Disorder, which was the grim diagnosis we had all been expecting. However, the doctor did stress that Morris is quite clearly having the sort of developmental problems which, at puberty, often lead children like him to be referred back to the hospital - with a diagnosis like Asperger's Syndrome as a future possibility.

So it's not a complete all-clear, but it does mean Morris should be able to overcome his difficulties with special needs help at school, and eventually live a normal life as a grown-up, having a job, relationships etc and children himself.

He's such a darling and we're all very relieved here. Not least Morris, who grinned broadly on our return from the hospital, hearing that the doctor had said he was 'OK'.

lazy days

It’s been good to spend time with the kids this half term; as someone who works from home, but also has to look after small children for most of the day, there are always times when I find myself saying ‘Go away, I’m busy’ and feeling torn between getting work done and being there for the kids. It’s tough, especially when my commitments as a performer mean I have to go out in the evenings more, often travelling long distances, so sometimes I don’t get to say goodnight to them at bedtime. Because of that, I’ve dropped some work this half term to just hang with the kids and my husband ... that’s one reason I’ve been blogging less over the past few days.





And the kids wanted to see themselves on the net, so here - by popular request - are my twin sons Morris (in the stripey top) and Dylan. They are three and a half now, but these pictures were taken by me last summer in the Isle of Man, when they were just three.