at the three mills of Skerries. Kate will help to launch the third Fingal Poetry Festival on Thursday 15th September with Irish poets, film-makers and performers. She is the guest of its Artistic Director, Enda Coyle-Greene. They met at Poetry on The Lake in Italy many Autumns ago. This event will be a real reward for the two years of lockdown we’ve endured, during which time Kate sent a film-poem for the Festival 2021. Now invited to appear and read it again in person! Thank you as ever to the patrons.
Category Archives: News
Red Door invites you in
Next Sunday, 31st July, 2022, you are cordially invited to another reading from Red Door Poets and their special guests.
Readers will be Elizabeth Horsley and her guest Tamsin Hopkins, Gillie Robic and her guest Kate Miller, Lesley Sharpe and her guest Sarah Westcott.
It is free on Zoom. Register here with Eventbrite. It will run from 6 – 7 pm.
First Film Festival success
Jack Trewin and I are delighted with our first film festival selection. ” As Windmills Did” ( originally for the Fingal Poetry Festival 2021) has been selected for the new Danish festival, Uninhabited, which runs in June 2022 in Copenhagen.
Fingal Poetry Festival September 2021
Kate has been commissioned to write and record a new film-poem with Jack Trewin to help launch the 2021 Fingal Poetry Festival on 16 September. Watch now on Youtube, click on the Fingal Poetry Festival link. In it she celebrates windmills and other working buildings in the landscape. Despite the fact that they are often neglected after they become redundant, there is a gaunt magnetism about them. Fingal Poetry Festival takes place at Skerries where there are three remarkable mills, two in working order and a third, the Small Mill, once thatched and diminutive, said to have been built following the example of mills seen on the Crusades.
Recently she talked with Tim Relf for the magazine Country Life on the subject of writing on the countryside, about the abiding influence of early twentieth century poet and journalist Edward Thomas and the renewed interest, during lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, in poetry that observes and records farming and rural life. This issue will mark National Poetry Day which this year falls on October 1.
The Queen of Naples, asked about her childhood home
While movement was still restricted in June 2020, Kate and the artist Jack Trewin began a second collaboration at a distance. The result, based on another poem from The Long Beds is an audio-video collage even more visually layered than Keepers of the States of Sleep and Wakefulness, their first joint venture which recently charmed a wide audience.
Inspired by Roddy Lumsden’s 2015 Poetry School classes on the Tempest, it imagines Shakespeare’s Miranda, now a Queen. She is revisiting childhood experiences long after being freed from the magical isolation (twelve years, another level of lockdown) that her father had created with the help of others he held captive.
Kate and Jack struck lucky in their picture research when they found that the ‘song’ of a piping bee transcribed in the early 17c treatise on bees by Reverend Charles Butler has been recorded by the choir of Little St Mary’s, Cambridge. And they were delighted to be permitted to use the solo on the soundtrack.
Launching The Long Beds on 23 Sept
Woman of Letters
Carcanet Press recently asked Kate to record answers to five questions about her reading and writing habits. In this video she likens her own slow methods to growing – and pruning – fruit trees and reads from the sequence of poems about her grandmother Muriel, writer and broadcaster. Also in a blog entry for Carcanet, 15 July 2020, she reflects on the reluctance we have to recalling childhood once we are separated at a great distance by age, geography and circumstance.
Always surprised and slightly short changed to see the UK editions of poetry books first published in US ( e.g. Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck), how they vary in size and weight – smaller, slimmer, thinner paper – and give such different clues in their cover designs.
Andrew Latimer at Carcanet has finalised a new design for The Long Beds; this image was only for prepublication purposes. But I liked it. It reminded me of Joan Jonas’s Helen in Egypt: Lines in the Sand which she brought to Tate Modern in 2018.
Sadly died, as the saying goes, a victim of Coronavirus! On 22 March this year I suggested to Andrew that I would take a camera along the beach at Camber and get some less heavily walked-over shots of rippled sand and feet. But lock down the very next day put paid to that.
The Long Beds in its second coat of many colours will be available in bookshops on 30 July 2020. If you would like to preorder it with the friends and family discount code, drop Kate a line.
Keepers of the States of Sleep & Wakefulness, fragment from a Masque
Made during the second month of Covid-19 and launched on Youtube on May Day 2020, this is Kate’s audio recording of her poem inspired by and dedicated to NHS nurses who cared for her at an earlier time. Music and costume designs date from the original Masque of Queens, 1609, by Ben Jonson, lavishly designed for the Court of King James by Inigo Jones. The video montage and editing is the work of Jack Trewin. It was such a good long distance collaboration that they are considering making a second film before the summer is out.
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!
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.
