This is Ludlow Fringe!

I'm really happy to be working with Ludlow Fringe - an energetic young festival that will take place 21^st to 30^th June.  It will be hard to miss.  Like everyone this year, it's a tad short of dosh, but it's already attracting dozens of artists, musicians, poets, writers, comedians, dancers, singers and performers of all ages on a real wave of enthusiasm.

The idea is that Ludlow Fringe will build on its successful beginning in 2012 to put on some 50 events which will be accessible across the community, with many free and family-friendly experiences around the town centre.

Ticket prices will be kept low, with most events either FREE or under a fiver. 

So far there are plans for a lighthearted Poetry Weekend with pop-up readings, a Poetry Trail and workshops for children and adults: plenty of poetry just for fun.  The Emergency Poet will be on hand to dispense essential poetic first aid from her vintage 1950s ambulance.  

The town’s toes will tap to music ranging from Classical through Folk and Jazz to Rock.  A Visual Arts Trail is planned by local artists, young arts graduates and students.  Ludlow’s choirs are limbering up for special performances.  

There will be Comedy Club nights, Cabaret and Burlesque and a special Arts, Crafts and Vintage Market to give local artists and makers the opportunity to sell their works direct to the public.  And, to provide the essential and traditional Shakespeare production, there will have a company of young actors made up from members of Ludlow College and Ludlow School, who will be performing different plays at St Laurence’s Church over two nights.

Amazing place, Ludlow.  

The pleasures of choosing a book cover

Very, very excitingly, the publication of my first collection from Oversteps Books draws closer... With a bit of luck it'll be out in time for my reading at StAnza International Poetry Festival in March.

I'm very fortunate in knowing so many talented artists, and Silvana McLean has most generously allowed us to use her work for the front cover.  It's a painting in gesso with oil glazes called 'Equilibrium'.  Its intense colour, Silvana's trademark sense of texture and depth and the extraordinary strangeness of the scored stacks and perfect coil of the balanced, floating shell all made it irresistible to me.

The book is called 'Not Lost Since Last Time', and this is the title poem, and why I wanted this image so much.  Thank you Silvana.


Not Lost Since Last Time

The borrowed pony, round as a rolling sea,
walks willing, for once, plodding the boom
of breakers down a sheeptrack.

Reins loose through fingers and gut jarred softly
by hooves, a child riding between leather
and sky, slack and absent, her thoughts

coiled in her grandmother’s shell
on its dusty sill, in not its native land.
The shell’s still curled round this green morning

when, young and sudden, a fox is on the path,
giving its absolute attention, and not afraid.
The fox, the pony, the sheeptrack,

the stones steeped in the fell below
this red-brush moment’s contact
between wild, and not-wild.

The child watching and finding
that she was all of them
and not them either.

*
Still it sits like a small red god on the sheeptrack,
ears cocked. It turns up again in the ribcage,
an expanding red-brush moment’s joy

at being all of them, and not them;
like holding the shell, fat weight in the hand,
and checking that the sea’s inside, not lost since last time.