In the midst of poetry festivals, woodland walks and helping with filial house moves, and all the to-ing and fro-ing from Bristol to various stops along the Kennet & Avon and back, and from Bristol to North Yorkshire and back, but not from Bristol to Devon and back because I still haven't managed to get there yet this spring, I have been working on - and have now submitted - the manuscript for my next poetry collection to the redoubtable Dawn and Ronnie of Indigo Dreams Publishing.
It's going to be called Map Reading For Beginners, which is the title of a poem I wrote after a visit to Partrishow in the Black Mountains the winter before last. This is, of course, a metaphorical reading, but if some hapless navigators buy it by mistake, in the hope of finding out how to negotiate bogs and/or orientate themselves in thick Dartmoor fog*, well, they might still learn something, even if it wasn't what they were expecting.
Map Reading For Beginners is scheduled for publication this coming autumn, with a Bristol launch around the time of the Bristol Poetry Festival towards the end of September, and I'm already excited about it.
And here is its cover, drawn by the aforementioned Kennet & Avon-dwelling Dru Marland. I am so proud of it that I'm not going to apologise for posting a picture of it again. I just have to make sure that the poems do it justice.
*You listen for the sound of running water and make your way to the nearest river, following it downstream until you reach a road, where, with a bit of luck, you might eventually reach civilisation.
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