For Love of 2015

I've had an extraordinary year. The only diminishment to the pleasure has been the inability to share any of it with my parents, especially my mother, my best friend, who I often used to speak to in my thoughts.

The first spectacular was the shortlisting of Imagined Sons for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society--or, more specifically, the judges, Julia Copus, Kei Miller and Grayson Perry. For a manuscript first completed in 2006, honed nearly until publication in 2014, I was honoured and thrilled to receive national recognition.

Not long after the shortlisting, Susannah Herbert phoned to ask if I'd serve as a judge for the Forward Prizes in Poetry. The work proved exceptionally heavy--180 books, 225 poems (or thereabouts)--with a quick turnaround before the shortlist meeting. It was a treat to work with A.L. Kennedy, Emma Harding, Warsan Shire and Colette Bryce, and I learned so much about the way poetry collections operate, about the way they achieve integrity and excellence.

With the Forward prizegiving and celebration on 30 September and the new academic year commencing at the same time, I felt overwhelmed and delighted with my year in poetry. At the end of October I attended one of the most personally gratifying events of the year, with the launch of my late friend Linda Lamus's collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta. Many publishers didn't want to touch a posthumous book by an unknown poet, but Mulfran Press took it on and produced a beautiful volume. The launch of the book in Bristol, with ten people who loved her reading a poem each, was perfect.


Yet there was more, relevant to my position teaching at Bath Spa University. To my delight, I received some teaching relief for the upcoming academic year, so while I'd be coordinating four modules, teaching PhD and undergraduate students doing independent studies, doing the usual load of moderation of marking for my own and other modules, and running the weekly first-year plenary series, I would not be teaching directly any individual modules and so not doing any large loads of marking. Instead of working five days a week for Bath Spa (I'm on a .7 contract, which means just under three-quarters' time), I would be working 2-3 days, so I'd have 4-5 days a week for my writing. Wa-hey! Further recognition came in December, with promotion to Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa.

I've had a splendid few months using the extra time the university's given me. I've been writing as much as possible, researching (this is the first book of poetry I've worked on that involved extensive research), and reading widely and voraciously. Thanks to my friends, colleagues, students and readers for your encouragement and support--I'm so grateful.

Here's to 2016!

Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (Carcanet, 2014)

I don't think these passages can demonstrate how strong this book is, but here's a taste nonetheless:
 

Allow your knees
and then your forehead an intimacy
with stone; know your ground.

*

...touch
this kneeling crowd--the tarmac
soft against the substance of its faith.

from "Groundation"

And foot

by weary foot, they found a rhythm

the measure that exists in everything.

from "Establishing the Metre"

...maps which throughout time have gripped like girdles

to make his people smaller than they were.

*

And how much life is land to which
we have no access? How much
have we not seen or felt or heard
because there was no word 
for it--at least no word we knew?
We speak to navigate ourselves
away from dark corners and we become,
each one of us, cartographers.

from the title poem

...nights are loud

with the shrugs of lizards.

end of "For the Croaking Lizards"

...you will discover that when victims live long enough they get their say in history....

from "Place Name: Shotover"

And at night there is almost nothing between

The things we say, and the things we mean.

end of "Distance"

You can buy The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion for 10% off directly from the publisher.