Looking for Christmas gift ideas???
Look to the Crocus is available to buy from here - Look to the Crocus
Or signed copies can be purchased directly from myself, email me at - sorlil@hotmail.co.uk
Looking for Christmas gift ideas???
Look to the Crocus is available to buy from here - Look to the Crocus
Or signed copies can be purchased directly from myself, email me at - sorlil@hotmail.co.uk
It's nearly here!
However, my writing is moving on. I've moved into dabbling with writing creative non-fiction essays over the last few months and I'm thoroughly enjoying the space to write in essay form yet with the feeling of the work coming together in a way not too differently from when a poem comes together. And I may be finding my way into writing poems in a different way from before too, it's too early to say if the poems are working out but I'm enjoying the process.
Anyway, here are a couple of poems published since my last update - 'The Branches of my Heart are Steel Wire' in The Manhattan Review, and 'Salt and Peat on my Tongue' in Atrium Poetry which can be read here.
As usual, keeping a record here of publications. I've had a few poems published recently. It feels like the waiting times for magazine submissions has vastly increased over the last few years. I'm guessing there are more folk writing and submitting poems now than ever before.
I have a couple of poems in the lastest issue of Stand Magazine, a couple of poems in Ofi Press issue 71 which you can read here. And, I'm particularly pleased to have a poem in the latest issue of The Manhattan Review.
Quite probably the last poems in magazine publication from my next poetry collection, Look to the Crocus, before it is due out in Springtime (may Spring come quickly).
I'm going through various drafts of my forthcoming collection, editing and cutting poems from it. I have way too many poems. It's a pleasant process to be absorbed in, particulary in these wintry cold days.
This Spain-inspired poem appeared on Ink, Sweat & Tears a while back.
A few poems from my Van Gogh sequence were published in the recent Poetry Salzburg Review.
I'm occasionally contacted by people who have been moved by one of my flower poems and it's nice to know that my poems are out there and working their way into occasional lives despite my minimal active involvement in the current poetry scene.
I'm so enjoying the work of Matthew Sweeney at the moment, it has taken me a while to really get on board with his poems but I'm seeing possibilities in his work that could potentially help me move on in my writing. I absolutely love his poem The Owl.
Mary Evans Picture Library/John Maclellan |
I stopped my ekphrastic writing spree at twenty poems and have since culled three from the sequence of poems as not up to standard. But the remaining seventeen poems I'm happy with! I recently re-read Sharon Olds' beautiful collection Stag's Leap and I so much admire how she shines a light on the tiny, mostly unnoticed moments in daily life and relationships and yet which encapsulates the essence of those relationships.
Being called 'young' in the poetry world has a decidedly different meaning from how the rest of the world defines 'young'! So bearing that in mind I'm happy to have a selection of poems translated into Greek in a newly published anthology of contemporary young Scottish poets (featuring also some genuinely young Scottish poets!!).
I have a poem showcased on the Mary Evans Poems and Pictures blog which you can read here.
Each poem in my sequence is ten lines long with an ababcdcdee rhyme scheme. I can't remember the last time I worked in such a regular form and although I'm not keeping to a regular meter or syllable count in each line, all the lines are fairly long and roughly the same length. It's been a mental pleasure to work within the rhyming scheme and great to move away from the more intensely lyrical poetry I normally write.
I absolutely love Porcelain, translated by Karen Reeder. Aside from the actual poems, it's a beautiful book inclusive of notes on the poems by Grunbein himself. It's a sequence of forty-nine poems about the destruction of Dresden by the allied forces during WW2. The poems of course are wonderful, fascinating, intriguing, informative, elegiac, questioning, all in Grunbein's stylish and ironic way of writing. It also includes photos of Dresden and artifacts mentioned in the poems. Only now translated into English, the poems are not recent works of Grunbein and proved controversial when they were first published in German in 2005.
My idea earlier this year of splitting the collection into three parts each prefaced with a quote has been abandoned! I have come up with a new book title (and feel fairly set on it) - googled it and checked on Amazon to make sure there were no other books by that title.
The spirit of Transtromer has been my guiding poet through many of these poems - in fact I wonder if I'll ever be able to write a poem again without having his work open in front of me for inspiration!
Undoubtedly I'll probably add a few more poems to it between now and eventual publication - whenever that may be - but right now it feels pretty complete.
And I feel set free to do something different...change direction...have a new focus in my poems. Perhaps a large scale project of some sort...I like the idea of having a specific book-length project for my next book.
However, the immediate focus is on submitting my manuscript to poetry publishers, tricky... as many are not accepting submissions at the moment because their publishing schedule has been disrupted by Covid.
However, my baby is ready to be sent out into the world, and it's an exciting place to be!
I recorded my poem 'Apple Trees' for a new podcast - Salon B- produced by Berghahn Books. The poem was first published in the academic journal Critical Survey and was inspired by folklore associations of the life of a newborn being inextricably linked to the fortunes of a newly planted tree. You can hear me read my poem at around 50/51 mins here.
I've been enjoying reading through the new biography of Sylvia Plath: Red Comet by Heather Clark. You'd think there couldn't possibly be anything left worth saying about Plath and her life that's not already been (excuse the pun) done to death. However, and I'm only about a third of the way into it, my feeling is this will be a fairly definitive, balanced, more objective and fuller examination of Plath's life in the context of her time than has been previously achieved. Plus it's always a pleasure to escape into a literary biography especially during these weird times.
I was delighted to read a very kind review of Madame Ecosse in the latest issue of The North magazine. The reviewer, John Killick, very kindly sent me a copy of the magazine via my local bookshop as it turned out he had bought my book actually here in Dunoon during a visit to the area! Anyway it was a very pleasant and unexpected surprise since Madame Ecosse has been out for over three years now.
I was also very happy to have a poem commended in the Buzzwords Poetry Competition judged by Penelope Shuttle. I've always been an admirer of Shuttle's poems and to have a poem of mine read and commented on by her in the judges report is such a pleasure to me. My poem 'The Telephone Box' can be read here alongside the winning poems. I particularly love Penny Boxall's beautiful runner-up poem.