News
Nancy Mattson (Writing with Mercury) tells us that she was interviewed by Helen Lowe on Plains FM in Christchurch (New Zealand). The programme is now on-line and can be accessed via the station's web site. She adds: “It can also be downloaded from there as an MP3 so it won't disappear. It's great fun hearing the kiwi accent meet the canuck!”
Gerard Benson, two of whose poetry collections have been published by Flambard, has just been appointed the first Poet Laureate of Bradford. Another Flambard writer and another long-time Bradford resident, Joolz Denby, has campaigned for such an appointment in recent years, and her perseverance has finally paid off. Gerard is particularly well-known for his children's books and was one of the trio of poets responsible for initiating the Poems on the Underground scheme in London, something that has since been copied in a number of cities around the world.
New Books
- April: All Things Tire of Themselves
- Arnold Wesker, who was knighted in the 2006 New Year’s Honours list for services to drama, is a major British playwright. Although he has written poems and published them in magazines for many years, he has not, until Flambard's publication in April of All Things Tire of Themselves, brought out a collection. This book has the poet's selection of his best and most characteristic poems.
In a Foreword commissioned for this publication, TV writer and producer Michael Kustow describes it as ‘an extended soliloquy about family, love, ageing, anger, Jewishness’ whose ‘predominant tone is one of sadness and disenchantment, but never resignation. . . Out of this struggle with despair, the poet delivers a hard-won wisdom, ‘a precarious triumph over thieving time.’ - April: The Fast Heat of Beauty
- The Fast Heat of Beauty is the debut collection from Anna McKerrow, a young poet with an exciting future ahead of her. These passionate, emotional and frequently tongue-in-cheek poems of love and spirituality come from a refreshing new female voice in modern poetry. They explore such themes as love, pain, healing, spirituality and the mysteries of the everyday, from the daily commute to consumerism.
Through her original and distinctive work she questions feminism, the wisdom of a handed-down culture and the gender divide. Her lyricism and humour reveal a refreshing and thought-provoking new female voice in modern poetry. - April: Recollections
- This book is a celebration in poetry and photography of the work and collections of the Museum of Antiquities at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, for the past forty years the main museum for Hadrian’s Wall. It has an internationally famous collection of Roman antiquities. In 2009 the collection will be transferred to the new Great North Museum.
This volume brings together the poetry of the museum’s poet-in-residence, Maureen Almond, and the photographs of the museum’s Audio-Visual Officer, Glyn Goodrick and explores the interconnections between the Romans and the modern museum visitor. Its elegant and stylish design make it an ideal souvenir of the museum and its collections. - April: Dusk Music
- Rob Chapman has been a regular contributor to Mojo, Uncut and The Times, as well as a broadcaster with the BBC. He is the author of Album Covers from the Vinyl Junkyard and Selling the Sixties, which was included in the Guardian’s top ten music books of the year in 1992.
Now he has written Dusk Music, an entertaining and darkly comic account of a pop musician’s career across several decades:
When teenage guitar prodigy Keith Gear shares a stage with Jimi Hendrix in mid 60s Soho he forms a bond with his hero and embarks on a journey that will take him a long way from his South London roots. Reluctantly thrust into the spotlight with his band Dominion, he plays the fame game briefly and finds it wanting.
With Jimi he enjoys acid trips in London, jam sessions in New York and reflective evenings in Morocco. In the decades that follow he experiences cult fame as a solo artist and sees a close friend become an unlikely star on the alternative comedy scene. By the 1990s a psychopathic celebrity killer is on the loose and the ageing and battle-worn Gear is largely forgotten. In the midst of all this a chance encounter at the Avalonia festival opens up unexpected pathways for Gear’s future.
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