Poetry Consultancy
Congratulations to Dominic Fisher, long-time Leaping Word poet, whose second collection, ‘A Customised Selection of Fireworks’ (Shoestring Press) is on the brink of publication.
Dominic will be launching his book at Bristol Folk House on Thursday 16th June at 7.30pm, with guest readings from fellow-IsamBards, Pameli Benham, David Johnson and Deborah Harvey. If you’re in the locality, do come along and help the evening go with a bang.
We’re absolutely delighted that a collection by Stewart Carswell, who used to workshop his poems with The Leaping Word while studying for his PhD in Bristol, is to be published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2021.
Entitled ‘Earthworks’, the collection explores the connection between human relationships and British landscapes, and how these are influenced by a greater backdrop of history and politics. In particular, the poems draw upon locations and heritage from across the West Country, including West Kennet long barrow in Wiltshire, Offa’s Dyke in Gloucestershire, and the industrial heritage of the poet’s native Forest of Dean.
Stewart adds: “‘Earthworks’ features poems I have been working on over the last five years, since my first pamphlet ‘Knots and Branches’ (Eyewear publishing) appeared, such as ‘Silver Turn’, which is influenced by the Roman temple in Littledean, Gloucestershire, overlooking a large meander in the River Severn.”
‘Silver turn’ is available to read on Stewart’s website.
This is Beetor Cross on Dartmoor. It’s on the B3212 that crosses the moor from Moretonhampstead to Yelverton. It’s also known as The Watching Place, and there are several stories in circulation as to why this might be the case.
The first is that it was the haunt of a highwayman called John Fall, whose speciality was leaping out at his victims and taking them by surprise. Then there’s the theory that it marked the point beyond which French and American officers on parole from Dartmoor prison during the Napoleonic wars and living in Moretonhampstead were not permitted to proceed. Or that in mediaeval times it was the site of the gallows, where relatives or friends of the condemned person would watch and wait for permission from the Lord of the Manor to cut down the corpse.
My favourite story is that the name dates back to an outbreak of plague in 1626, which was spread by soldiers and sailors travelling between Barnstaple and Plymouth via the Mariner’s Way. Some of the inhabitants of a settlement called Puddaven, near Beetor Cross, were afflicted, and as they were no longer able to care for themselves, every evening neighbours placed provisions for them on a flattish stone at some distance from the house. They would then retreat to wait and watch. If the food was removed, fresh supplies would be left the following day. On the fifth day no one came and the food stayed where it was, so the neighbours understood that the last survivor had died. So, having approached the house, with no response to their shouts, the neighbours set fire to the thatch and burnt it down in the hope that this would stop the plague spreading further. From this time, it is said, the area became known as the Watching Place.
Something about this old story, the solidarity shown by neighbours during a time of great fear and uncertainty, lifted it above its rivals and prompted me to start writing a story of my own. As part of my research, I read all the folklore I could connected with the moor, and found several other stories associated with outbreaks of plague.
Notably, there was the story told about Merrivale by the celebrated chronicler of Dartmoor, William Crossing, who recalls that the area of Bronze Age relics on Longash Common was once known as Plague Market, the tradition being that during outbreaks of plague at Tavistock, food would be left there by moor folk for townspeople to collect.
And another that attaches itself to sites all over the country, but on Dartmoor to the ruins below Hound Tor: that the mediaeval village was abandoned during the Black Death. I visited and was moved not just by the deaths of the villagers but by the detail of their lives also, such as the fact they built their houses into the side of a hill, with livestock housed in the shippon at the lower end, and a gully cut to drain the slurry, and the step leading up into the cramped communal sleeping chamber.
And I read and wrote, and wrote and read, and after seven years there was a coming-of-age novel, and after a few more years, during which it sat on my laptop while I wrote poetry, and won a prize to have a collection published, it finally emerged into a largely oblivious world under my publishers’ Tamar Books imprint.
I picked up a copy the other day and read the back. Swine flu … avian flu … SARS … We are frequently warned of imminent, drug-resistant pandemics. But what is it really like to wait for the end of the world? Then I opened it and flicked through. Social distancing. Self-isolation. It’s all in there, centuries before these practices were formally identified and their names coined.
There’s even a scene involving frenetic hand washing, though no emphasis on that as a way of avoiding infection, because my characters, stuck in 1349, wouldn’t have known that. And besides it’s fleas they should mostly have been avoiding.
Every day on Twitter there are countless stories of selflessness, bravery and idiocy surrounding Covid-19, and I’m reminded again and again that while pandemics come and go, and technology and medical treatments improve, people are essentially the same as they’ve always been. We’re all in the Watching Place now, and I feel a renewed closeness to characters that were such a big part of my life for so long.
If you’d like to read an extract of ‘Dart’, please click on this link.
Cover illustration and map by Dru Marland
This blog was first published on The Red Dress of Poetry.
The arrival and ritual opening of a box of newly published books is always an exciting moment. And this time we were especially pleased to see that the printers had padded the cargo with paper rather than bubble wrap.
The Shadow Factory is our Deb’s fourth poetry collection from Indigo Dreams Publishing, and its evocative title is straight out of her childhood in 1960s Bristol. ‘As a young girl I was fascinated by the rollsign of the 98 bus that gave its destination as The Shadow Factory,’ she explains, ‘but as the stop we had to get off at came before the terminus, I never got to see it, and an intimation of certain disappointment prevented me from asking what was made there. As a result, The Shadow Factory became a warehouse of wishes and unrealised dreams, a metaphor for life and death, and eventually this collection of poems that explore childhood, memory and the twilight of those household gods we call parents.’
Other poets have had complimentary things to say about our new addition.
Pascale Petit, who awarded the poem Oystercatchers 1st prize in the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem competition says: ‘Every word is weighted. Although nothing is explicit, something important is being enacted, and the epigraph by Camus adds an anchor, so that we guess his are the words being taken to the sea and released from the heart. I kept coming back to this and getting more from it.’
And in her sensitive review, poetry film maker and novelist Lucy English says ‘The desire to find a place which is ‘not a leisurely stroll from the ice cream van,’ is a strong theme in this collection. [Harvey] comments on the natural world as if this, and not human life is the greater force … Landscape, animals and birds have an intrinsic beauty which she describes with care.’
To read a selection of the poems from The Shadow Factory, please click here.
We still have a few vacancies in our new poetry writing group, the first meeting of which will be on Friday 22nd November 2019, from 10.00am – 1.00pm, upstairs in the Music Room of Bristol Folk House, 40a Park Street, Bristol, BS1 5JG.
The group will take place on the penultimate Friday of every month (bar October 2020), same time and venue, and the cost is £10 per session.
Dates booked for the first twelve months are as follows: 22nd November and 20th December 2019, and 24th January, 21st February, 20th March, 17th April, 22nd May, 19th June, 24th July, 21st August, 18th September, 16th October, and 20th November 2020.
We don’t require people attending to be at a specific level of expertise, although very inexperienced poets might be asked to submit a sample of their writing when they apply to join the group. What we do need from you is a willingness to improve, to write and read poetry widely, and to work towards getting your poems published.
If you’re interested and would like a further details, please contact us at admin@theleapingword.com.
The Leaping Word 