Poetry for Christmas...

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

And here it is!

 

 It's nearly here!

It's been a long journey getting to this point with Look to the Crocus but I'm delighted with it. 

Through the creating and editing process, the manuscript has gone through many shapes and forms like a snake shedding skin. The final result is a tripart collection: Flowers & Trees, The Long Water, and Mother Moon, and each section is prefaced with a quote from Theodore Roethke. 

It contains my versions of Scottish ballads, close encounters with nature, my relationship with the Firth of Clyde, and elegies to my parents. The presiding poets include Roethke, Transtromer, Plath, W.S. Graham, Sujata Bhatt and D.H. Lawrence.

The cover art was created by Irish artist Brigid Collins after I met her in a special garden.

John Killick was central to bringing this book to publication and I'm hugely grateful for his support for my work. 

Unexpected delays has meant the publication of Look to the Crocus has yet to materialise and, quite honestly, I've no idea when it will... Putting together the collection now feels like a project from the distant past.

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. 

I suppose I had become quite bored with my usual approach to writing, it was becoming 'samey' / repetitious, no sense of tapping into anything new. 

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.