Bristol Poetry Festival so far and a visit to Wells Festival of Literature 2017

The Bristol Poetry Festival is galloping into its final week. The last seven days have seen fantastic sets from Tara Bergin, Liz Berry, Helen Ivory, Lucy English, and Lois P Jones (the winner of this year's Bristol Poetry Prize), and Martin Figura's stylish and affecting new show about love, loss and poetry, Dr Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine, which I absolutely recommend. Plus a ground-breaking fusion of BSL poetry and poetry film, including translations into sung notation (an indequate way to describe it but the best I can do), with Paul Scott, Helen Dewbury, Chaucer Cameron, Victoria Punch and Kyra Love.  And last night a beautiful, beautiful launch for the anthology of poems by contemporary Georgian women poets, 'The House with No Doors', translated by Natalia Bukia-Peters and Victoria Field, with music from the Borjghali Choir which made me want to dance up and down the aisles of St Stephen's Church. (I desisted but it was a close thing.) 

Then there was Dru Marland's launch of her latest collection, Drawn Chorus, published by Gert Macky, which took place last Monday and which was A Roaring Success. 

Here are the guest poets!



















Today it was off to Wells Festival of Literature for a bit of a change. I'd been asked to get the reception for this year's shortlisted poets in the poetry competition under way by reading my poem 'Mr Cowper's Hares', which won last year's Hilly Cansdale prize for local poets. And since it's always a pleasure to go to Wells, I was happy to oblige. 

And it all went ever so well. 

Here are a few of the City of Wells in Autumn photos such an occasion demands. 

St Cuthbert's

The view from the pub

Stained glass autumn ash with Cathedral backdrop

The ruined Great Hall of the Bishop's Palace

Stained glass from ruined French churches, post Revolution

Tudor fireplace

Fountain

Not falling into the mediaeval conduit on the way back to the car

A Poem for World Mental Health Day 2017

William Cowper was an 18th century poet and hymn writer, born a generation or two before Blake, Coleridge, Clare and Keats, and like them, posthumously diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Of course, we can never really know what caused their mental illness and it seems rather prurient to conjecture about this aspect of their lives. In any event, what's more interesting about Cowper is the fact he kept three orphaned hares as pets and found some comfort in caring for them. 

Mr Cowper’s Hares

And so he sits without moving

holds them in his lap

not so tightly they’ll take fright

leap through the window

scream up the lane

outstripping every attempt to catch them

hurling themselves

from rock to moss to wild supposition

till they’ve gone beyond all returning

no longer know they have a home

and not so softly they’ll take fright

bolt down the passage

out through the door

dodging the grasp of passers-by

plunging

almost suicidal into tan pits

brought back half-drowned in a sack

caked with lime

and so he holds them without moving

pent between his hands

sees his reflection

in their mad amber eyes

©Deborah Harvey 2016

This poem won the Hilly Cansdale Prize for Local Poets at Wells Literature Festival last year, and I'll be reading it at the prize-giving ceremony for this year's shortlisted poets, this Sunday at 3.30pm in the Bishop's Palace. 

A Visit to Wells Festival of Literature 2016

After two weeks of intense poetry rehearsing, reading and listening at the glorious Bristol Poetry Festival, we were off to Wells today for more of the same at the Wells Festival of Literature. 

It's never a hardship to go there, especially at this time of year. The light is golden on golden stone, the interplay with the trees astounding, even when you've seen it before.

And how can you not love England's smallest city, with this view on one side ... 

... and this on the other? 

We were headed for the poetry judging at the Bishop's Palace, as my poem 'Mr Cowper's Hares' was slugging it out with the other shortlisted poems for one of the prizes on offer. 

I've a soft spot for the Wells Festival of Literature poetry competition because back in 2010, my poem 'Coleridge Changes his Library Books' took first prize. It was this that prompted me to stick my head above the parapet and start going to open mics and entering more competitions - which in turn led to a publishing deal for my poems and my novel, and the making of so many friends in the poetry community.

As it is, 'Mr Cowper's Hares' put up a good fight and came away with the Hilly Cansdale prize for local poets in their paws.