The Collectors

Introducing The Collectors, new short film, launched September 2024, which features four art works in materials rescued from refuse. Collaborating again with artist and video editor Jack Trewin, Kate and new friends have been taking part in the village Climate Conversation in Isle of Oxney. For nearly a year they have been saving and re-examining small articles of everyday waste and redisplaying them in a new light, in a kind of masquerade of bird figures. This is not a film poem but it shares some of the characteristics of earlier work.

Four characters based on birds – owl, swan, magpie, kingfisher. Each piece is built from rubbish: single-use plastics, packaging, care labels or just junk. Each refashioning of everyday stuff questions why it was discarded. With poetic narration and close-up footage, we explore the gap between birds’ habits of collecting and our own. Let these birds remind us how human refuse contaminates ecosystems. Will the natural world recover if we use less and waste nothing?

Readings, Music, Dances in the Night sky

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.

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.

Stocks Mill, Wittersham, Kent

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.

Warm reception for The Long Beds & what lies ahead

On 1st February 2021, Youtube admits you to launch night of Kate’s reading and interview with Simon Trewin, recorded on 23 September 2020, thanks to the unflagging work of the small team at Carcanet Press.

Poetry Review, the British quarterly, included a fantastic review of the book by Sarah-Jean Zubair in their Winter 2020 volume 110:4.

‘Haunting’, wrote one watcher of her film-poem “The Queen of Naples, asked about her Childhood Home“. New commissions for film-poems are in the pipeline, so too are opportunities to connect across site specific and cross-disciplinary networks with CollectIvel (linking music with English rivers) and in Dublin, Poetry at Skerries Mills (linking windmills and perhaps granaries, oast houses, and other tall structures in the landscape).

Stocks Mill, Wittersham

This year’s Waterloo Festival (on the theme of Respair) revisits the Festival of Britain (1951) a favourite subject of Kate’s. As a student at St Martin’s she cycled up and down the South Bank with her first mobile site specific sculpture that recalled the Skylon. So long ago that she doesn’t have a digital photo.

Skylon by Hidalgo Moya for Powell and Moya, 1951

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.

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.