It’s very heartening for a poet to get some feedback on their work. Sometimes it feels like we are shouting at the wind. I’d like to thank London Grip and James Roderick Burns for a much appreciated review:

These are not sad poems, or despairing in any way. They simply note the small accretions of feeling with each new location (or perhaps dislocation) that takes place in the poet’s life – the north east, her Scottish roots, the Pennines, London. Images of rootedness lost, the struggle to identify with a new place or circumstance, and inevitable departure pile up page after page, lending the whole volume a rich, melancholy air.

Poet Sarah Watkinson, whose work I very much admire, has also said a few nice things (unprompted!) about the pamphlet on a poetry FB page. Thank you Sarah!

Beautiful poems about place, displacement and identity, soundly but unobtrusively crafted, working together in a way collections rarely do, to create a 4D picture of what’s it’s like to be British. I particularly liked ‘Underworld’ for its picture of ghosts and ‘piston-draught’ in the London Undergound, and ‘Epigenetics’, with its brilliant last line. And ‘Deposition’. The voice is extremely engaging, and personal without egotism. Bravo!

I have two exciting opportunities to read from the pamphlet coming up:

The Witham Arts Centre, Horsemarket, Barnard Castle, on Thursday 27th September at 6pm. My home crowd! Please come along – it’s FREE!

Poetry Swindon Festival, reading with Rachael Clyne and Sarah L. Dixon + Open Mic
Thursday 4th October, Tent Palace of the Delicious Air 13.30 – 15.30.

I’m delighted that a pamphlet that has so much about the North and the South in it, will be heard in both of those places.