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: Readings
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.
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.
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.
Being heard AND seen
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.
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!