The IsamBards at the 2019 Bee and Pollination Festival

Following our poetry walks at the Bristol Botanic Garden back in May, the IsamBards were invited to lead some more during the Bee Festival last weekend. 

Hastily we dug out our poems that mentioned bees and other pollinators, and wrote a few more to supplement them. All set.

The heavens opened between the two walks on Saturday, resulting in fewer listeners for our second walk on Saturday afternoon, which also clashed with a guided tour of the garden.

And yet, in a blatant contravention of all the known laws of poetry readings, we actually gathered more listeners as we proceeded around the garden. Much like a stone does moss. Or a tree trunk fungi.

One of the women we'd accumulated came up almost in tears at the end of the walk, and told us how terribly depressed she'd been feeling about the state of the country - nay, the world - but that listening to poetry had made her feel better ...  

... even if some of the poems were about how much worse EVERYTHING will be without pollinators. 

Talking of which, after I'd shared my lunch with this robin and before the afternoon walk, I wandered  around the garden photographing them. 

Are ladybirds pollinators? Yes! (Note also photobombing shield bug.)

And as is the way of things, along came a few other IsamBardian opportunities as we went on our merry way.

Look out for possible future encounters with the IsamBards in Bristol and Somerset in the run up to Christmas, and at Arnos Vale cemetery. 

(Ooh good, a use for all those poems about death.) 

And we were interviewed and photographed, jointly and severally, for a putative article in the Guardian, about the bee festival, or maybe bee-keeping in general, and of course that sort of happening usually has Disappointment written all over it, but no doubt we'll be scouring the papers for a month or so.

Postscript: Here is the article! 

                                                                        Photo by Alex Turner for The Guardian

Hey - Hey - Hay-on-Wye

Having recently delivered 25 boxes of books to the Amnesty International Bookshop, it probably wasn't the best idea in the world to head for Hay-on-Wye with the ever-present danger that I might repopulate the corners of my house that are now free of piles of tomes.   But too late, there I was, in the small border town of approximately 30 second hand bookshops, with a credit card in my mitt and a crazed gleam in my eye.  

Hay is made for nostalgia.

There are delights at every turn.

Look, pottery and poetry, two of my favourite things and only a consonant to choose between them. 

And everywhere books, books, books, books, books ... 

In Hay-on-Wye, the townsfolk  are less than enthusiastic about Kindles.

In fact, you could say that they don't kindle any affection in the them whatsoever. 

It's no use arguing with them about it either. (Not that I own one myself, you understand.)

This shop displays the inside of a Transylvanian church along with its merchandise ...  

... this is a former cinema ...

... and this isn't a shop at all really. 

Not the sort of book I tend to read but irresistible all the same.

Over lunch - and later, tea, cake and the Guardian Quick Crossword - we gloated over our acquisitions and rested up ... 

... ready for the next onslaught.

There are some shops that don't sell books ...  

... and we did tear ourselves away long enough to admire a rainbow arcing over the River Wye ...  

... but most of our pleasures were bibliophilic.  Can you guess which book I fell for out of this selection?

Clue, it's the one written by a poet with a beautiful, gold-embossed spine ... to go with my Selected Poems of Grevel Lindop, Collected Poems of E J Scovell, an American edition of Emily Dickinson's love poems, and a Jarrold Pathfinder Guide to Peak District Walks. Result!  

Still Burning

The Guardian has posted a fascinating video by the film-maker Sandra Lahire to mark the 50th anniversary today of the death of Sylvia Plath, whose poetry still burns as fiercely as ever.