'Learning Finity' coming soon

I'm delighted that after a brief delay for personal reasons, my new collection of poems, Learning Finity, will be published on 14th March 2022 by Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams Publishing. Here's the front cover, of St Leonard's Lane, which probably has the most ridiculous double yellow lines in the country.

The visual resemblance of the title design to the opening crawl of the Star Wars films is serendipitous, but not misplaced. The poems in Learning Finity are set in my native city of Bristol, but travel back and forth through time, where everything changes but stories are always remembering themselves. 

More details on its real-life and Zoom launch to come. In the meantime, here's a
link to its page on the Indigo Dreams website, where pre-orders are being taken, and for good measure, a colourised photo of Gloucester Road circa 1960, at the junction of Bishop Road, where my great-grandparents lived, before passing their house onto my grandparents and their eleven children in the late 1940s. You can see Mr Hacker's the greengrocer in the foreground, and on the opposite side of the road, Miss Wyatt's Newsagent, which features in one of the poems that makes up my Gloucester Road Odyssey.   

Poetry and Time-Travel

There are strange time-lags in poetry sometimes. After spending most of last year watching and listening, I've been completely immersed in a different way of writing this spring, as part of my studies at the Manchester Writing School. I'm hoping the resulting sequence of poems will become a pamphlet exploring the patch of edgelands we've been visiting since the first lockdown, and which I've been documenting in this blog. 

Meanwhile, my publishers, Dawn and Ronnie of Indigo Dreams, have sent me the first draft of my fifth collection, Learning Finity, to work on, which means taking a complete break from common, wood and field for a week or two, and revisiting poems almost all of which were written before the pandemic struck.  It's a big shift back to a past that now seems a long time ago. 

For me, writing poems is a particularly intense means of expression. My brain tends to up sticks and shift completely into the world my current poems inhabit, so switching from one project to another does feel like negotiating a rift.  This is ameliorated, however, by the fact that the poems of Learning Finity exist mostly in mythic time, and are themselves well practiced in time travel.  And to encourage me in making this mental leap, my copy of Poetry Salzburg No 37 arrived from Germany today, in which three of my Learning Finity poems find themselves in excellent company. I'm especially pleased that they're alongside work by my comrade in poetry, Chaucer Cameron. 

I've realised that during this time of pandemic and Poetry Zoom, I haven't been posting much about poetry and publications.  They have, however, been getting out and about while we haven't been able to. Here are a few more of the publications they've appeared in. Many thanks to the editors involved.