Author Archives: kate

Adding the Magpie

The online launch of the anthology Corvids and Others, crow family poems, takes place on Wednesday 16 February 2022 in the rookish company of many London based poets and some from further afield. Hit the title for the link and join us cawing!

Corvids and Others flyer 2022.pdf

  

One of Kate’s many bird poems, originally selected for The Rialto, reappears freshly in the anthology Corvids and Others, crow family poems selected by Susan Watson for the South London bookseller, Crow on the Hill. The launch has been postponed and the shop is currently closed, although at the moment it is still possible to buy books online from https://booksellercrow.co.uk/.  In the meantime the pamphlet is still available from www.greatesthappiness.co.uk .

The frescoes described in Adding the Magpie are from the Villa of Livia, second half of the 1st century BC, now in the Museo Nazionale at the Palazzo Massimo, Rome.

Being heard AND seen

Dahlia Bengal Tiger

Four poems are currently appearing in print, two in Irish journals – thanks to the editors of Southword 37 and Poetry Ireland Review 128 – and two in the TLS.

The latest one to flower should also be available on the TLS podcast of 10 October. Apparently I may need to convert the car in which I will be travelling in Turkey into my recording studio! Although the poem is titled Turned-down it has got the thumbs up from Alan Jenkins and Thea Lenarduzzi who assembles the podcast. And besides dahlias, it features the old bed which is the leitmotif of The Long Beds, a second collection due from Carcanet in July 2020.

Reading to launch Riverine

takes place on 26 June 2019 with architects and architectural historians who contributed essays to the 2014 conference on Architecture and Rivers at the University of Kent and the subsequent publication titled Riverine (Routledge, 2018).

Kate’s poem which honours the three Strand or Waterloo Bridges built between 1816 and 1944 and draws attention to the role of women in the building of the third, experiences the riverscape – as Monet and, later, those working women did – at sunrise.

Riverine: Architecture and Rivers

IMG_1400 2

Gerald Adler and Manolo Guerci, the editors of this book published today, admired Waterloo Sunrise, poem in 6 parts, commissioned in 2017 for the Waterloo Festival, and asked if they could include it with its proem – introductory section – with a short essay entitled Light Over Water. Because the proem was simply meant to herald the first performance it doesn’t appear elsewhere. It seems a good moment to upload the proem for a wider audience!

When there was only water

When there was no stretch between the strand and Lower Marsh, 

no span, no bearer over water except a wiry waterman,

at dawn, perhaps, the senses tuned to river flow,

fish dance, bird oratorio, meddled mud and silt and weed,

faint strains of a kind of blue, notes made before this place was Waterloo.

But chances are today – however close we hug the bank, or high we stand mid-river,

however keen our watch, bird eyed, 

above the water flecking pearl and bottle green –

our senses won’t be primed for sunrise, 

we’ll be unready for its marvellous surprise.

On the bridge attention flicks from seated gull to sidling crow to hissing 176.

The city plays its engines loud, thumping on until a break –

the lifeboat’s motor cuts out coming into dock – silent passage – Look!

The sun is lifted from its oven, to be blown.

Red blob of glass, red bulb, balloon, it wobbles on a stem of light,

lets light trail down. Just as gold leaf is laid, brush tipped with grease, it shivers 

as it flattens on the river.

Threads of gold snag on the drying wings of cormorants, Egyptians angled on a boat.

A lorry passes with UNUSUAL in giant lettering, a giant tweet.

As if to emphasise that sunrise is.

Hippocrates Book of the Heart

Poets and doctors speaking of the heart in its many phases – the Hippocrates Book of the Heart anthology had its London launch on 6 December 2017 at the Medical Society of London. Each English poet read an extra poem by a poet who could not be present by virtue of their living on another continent: USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the Far East.

I read ‘The Size of a Fist’ by New Yorker, Matthew Thorburn, along with my poem ‘The Smell of Hay’. It’s years since my father asked in the early days of his recovery from heart attack  “what’s in the scent of new mown hay?” and I have only recently researched the answer. Hexenel, a component of Green Leaf Volatiles,  or Hexanal released from the body immediately after death: both smell of cut grass.

The poem was written in ignorance of this, but clearly my father was on to something!slide1-4_270

Surprised!

News of a new shortlisting for The Observances just when I thought it was fast asleep (‘become the settled parishes of wood and weeds I thought would anchor us’). It is one of five chosen for the Michael Murphy Poetry Prize, to be announced on National Poetry Day, 28 September.allotment 5:10:16 IMG_1130

Sunset at St Hubert’s, sunrise at St John’s

You can hear Kate read with Chalk Poets at St Hubert’s, Idsworth, Hampshire on the evening of 19 May: Poems and Prosecco: celebrating Edward Thomas and other writers living on the Downs. A Piece of Chalk was commissioned for the Winchester Poetry Festival 2016  and the South Downs National Park Authority.
Christies sold temps couvert Waterloo Sunrise, a poem in six parts, newly commissioned for the Waterloo Festival at St Johns Waterloo will have its premiere on Friday 16 June in the company of the Southwark Stanza with whom Kate has long collaborated. The cafe style evening starts at 7.15pm, is followed by supper  and jazz. Dont miss the chance to hear A Kind of Blue (Miles Davis) performed by the Gary Crosby Sextet as the sun goes down.

Chalk talk and walk

The Chalk anthology is reviewed in the London Magazine, 8 Feb 2017 and there will be readings from it on the evening of Friday 19 May 2017 to raise funds to restore the completely beautiful small church of St Hubert’s, nestling under the Downs at Idsworth, near Rowlands Castle, Hampshire.st hubertsTickets now available, https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/event/EJIMMI

So 2017 starts

…with rooms full of books….(this looks like the Frick Collection but it can’t be) … at Waterstones Piccadilly, 7pm on Thursday 26 January (tickets for sale) reading with Kei Miller and William Letford, fellow Carcanet poets, in the series Stablemates, produced by Jill Abram

20151231040947and as part of the collective ‘Impossible House’, a collage of voices exploring the poetics of space: memories of rooms: upstairs at The Prince of Greenwich, Royal Hill, Greenwich, London SE10 on Wednesday 25 January at 830pm for Talking Rhythm arranged by Bernadette Reed. On 18 December 2016 the Impossible House was discussed on Radio Croydon’s monthly poetry hour by two of the poets involved, John Mackinnon and Helen Adie .