Still buzzing about selection of my poem Carnlough Bay for the Northern Irish section of the Places of Poetry anthology being launched on 1 October. It’s wonderful news that the UK Poetry Society‘s online launch on 1 October 2020 is FREE and you are very welcome to join us using this link here.

To celebrate the anthology’s launch, the project is also going to reopen the marvellous website map between 1 and 11 October so you will have extra time to add your favourite poems of place in the UK. They are hoping to gather another 2,500 poems to lift the total to 10,000 – so don’t hold back. There’ll be more about this on social media soon.

Congratulations to the Places of Poetry team on the project being shortlisted for ‘Research Project of the Year: Humanities and Social Sciences‘ at the THE Awards. You can see more about the award and shortlist here. Here’s wishing them all the very best!

One of the United Kingdom’s most beautiful poetic projects recently has been the Places of Poetry map, set up by Paul Farley and Andrew McRae. Last year we were invited to pin poems about any place to the relevant spot on the map, rather like Orlando in As You Like It pinning his love poems to trees. As the site said, Places of Poetry is open to all readers and writers. It aims to use creative writing to prompt reflection on national and cultural identities in England and Wales, celebrating the diversity, heritage and personalities of place. The site is closed now but the project has announced publication of a Places of Poetry anthology soon.

I am thrilled that my poem Carnlough Bay is selected for the Northern Ireland section of the anthology – here it is on the Words for the Wild website. I spent most of last weekend, with force 5 gales and rain beating down outside here in Kent, remembering the beauties of the gusty, damp coast of Northern Ireland where I grew up. Beloved places do glow in our blood and aspects of that gorgeous place are with me all the time: long breakers riding to the shore, the way the wind can haul you right over a cliff edge, seagulls who know that while we think we own the world, the land, air and oceans are always theirs. So, while the north winds battered at my windows, I recorded a wee video of Carnlough Bay. All the anthology poems will have videos to circulate in place of a launch.

It’s going to be a wonderful book – I can’t wait to read it. And I hope you enjoy our videos when they are released. Portstewart Strand in Northern Ireland where I grew up. Beautiful, whatever the weather. 

One of the silver linings of these grim times is that we can attend events all over the world without being there. Glasgow University’s conference (planned for last April) on public health and private illness – details here – has been revived online and I’m delighted to invite you to join us tomorrow from 7pm at an evening of creative reading.

I’ll be reading from Six-Count Jive (Lapwing Publications, Belfast, April 2019) and will be with:
Georgi Gill
Colette Coen
Sam Rose
Mara Dougall
Moira Dancer
Sara Louise Wheeler
Judy Crow
Caitlin Stobie
Gillian Shirreffs
MT Taylor
Jane Hartshorn and
Laura Donald

It’s going to be an amazing night. Please register here to get the Zoom details. See you there!