Readings Coming Up

I have a couple of readings coming up to share with you - one on Zoom and one live. 

7pm - 8pm  25th May 

The first reading is on Zoom at Finding the Words organized by Explore York Libraries and Archives. I will be reading alongside Bethany Rivers and Emma Storr.

To find out more and book a ticket: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/finding-the-words-with-zoe-brooks-bethany-rivers-and-emma-storr-tickets-574624506367 

8pm 9th June

I will be the headline reader at Reading's Poetry Cafe, 21 South Street, Reading, RG1 4QU. The event is run by the Reading Stanza. In addition to my reading there will be am open mic. Tickets are available here: https://whatsonreading.com/venues/south-street/whats-on/poets-cafe-2023 or on the door. They cost £5, £4 for open mics. 

Hope to see you at one of these events. 

Publication Nerves

 

It's the publication date for Fool's Paradise. I'm sending the preorders out this am and feeling horribly nervous as I do so.

This book means a lot to me for a number of reasons, not least because my late friend, Hannah, loved it so much. It's her artwork on the cover. We talked about publishing a limited edition of the poem illustrated by her prints, but she died before it could happen.

When I worry over the book and wondering whether I should have changed this word or whatever, I should remind myself that she believed in it and me. I should remind myself of Alison Brackenbury's and Fiona Sampson's words of approval on the back cover. Plus my publisher's excitement about the book. My insecurity is the reason I didn't publish anything for years, it's the reason I have such problems promoting my work and I must overcome it and I will.

Isabelle Kenyon - Promoting A Book

 

Isabelle Kenyon

I do not find self promotion very easy. In fact I cringe and procrastinate everytime I have to do it. Yes, I'm on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the first more so than the others, but it is not enough. And my publishers have a right to expect me to do some book promo, afterall they have invested time and money into making my book a success and so should I (time at least).  So about six months ago I decided I would invest in some book promotion. 

I turned to Isabelle Kenyon to act as publicist for me, on the recommendation on Anna Saunders. Over 3 months Isabelle got me 7 reviews with more hopefully on the way, a spoken word event, a blog interview,  youtube feature, 2 radio appearances and a podcast appearance. 

I was delighted with Isabelle's hard work. Of course Isabelle has a great list of contacts, which would take me ages to achieve and then I would need the temerity to approach them. But Isabelle also gave me the confidence to relax and focus on what I was good at - reading at open mics and giving readings. 

If you are interested in using Isabelle's services, I recommend them - you can find out about them here: https://isabellekenyonpoetry.wordpress.com/author-services/ 

For people who are perhaps earlier in their writing journey and are experiencing financial difficulties there are still a few free places on a workshop Isabelle is leading for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival next Tuesday available here https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/cheltenhampoetryfestival/t-axarox

My Poetry Collection Owl Unbound

 

My collection Owl Unbound (pub Indigo Dreams Publishing) was launched on the 23rd October at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. And I was joined by three very special poet friends - Fiona Sampson, Anna Saunders, and Adam Horovitz. It was a wonderful night. 

Now comes the business of selling it! You can buy a copy direct from me for £9.50 (postage is free in the UK) by emailing me on zoe.brooks@googlemail.com. If you want I can sign it for you. Alternatively it is available from my publishers Indigo Dreams or most online bookstores.

The launch reminded me how much I love reading to an audience and I actually quite enjoy reading on Zoom, so if there is anyone interested in my reading at a poetry event, please email me on the above email. 

Cover Reveal

Here it is - the cover of my collection Owl Unbound with Indigo Dreams Publishing. I am really pleased with it. The cover very cleverly references several poems in the collection. 

The collection will be published on 1st October with my launch on 23rd October on Zoom (more info to follow). It can be preordered from the publishers here: https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/zoe-brooks/4595048690. or you can order a copy from me (signed if you wish) on zoe.brooks@googlemail.com . 

Update on My Forthcoming Collection

The idea that my poetry collection will be published is becoming more and more real. I have sent off the final copy to Indigo Dreams, together with an information sheet about me and the book, and a head and  shoulders shot (how I hate photos of myself). 

The launch date is set: 23rd October. It will be a zoom event hosted by Cheltenham Poetry Festival. I will miss the party feel of a physical launch, but as I said in my last post a zoom event has the advantage of allowing me to invite people, such as my friends overseas, who would never get to a physical event. A number of poet friends will be joining me in reading at the launch (details tba), so it won't be unadulterated Zoe!  If you fancy coming, do drop me an email or post a comment below. Or just look out for my posts on twitter, facebook or instagram. Alas you will have to bring your own wine. 

Writing In the Time Of Covid 19

There is a Czech saying that my friend Hannah regularly quoted at me: "How to make God laugh - tell him your plans". My plans for this year were considerable. With my collection Owl Unbound due out this year, I had plans to build up my reputation at poetry readings, to network, to continue sending out to magazines, and of course to launch the book. God must have found them very amusing.

Even the sending out to magazines is becoming less easy as some print magazines are having problems with their printers. My publishers are having problems with their distributors. However online there is a surge in Zoom, Hangout and similar forms of internet events. I have enjoyed being a member of the audience at some of these. The Cheltenham Poetry Festival is organising a series of online workshops this summer and I am helping out with these.

And yet, online poetry for all its attactions, is not the same as being in a room with people. Technology (especially mine) has a habit of failing at the worst time. The connection falters and sometimes fails altogether, words are mangled, images of poets freeze. Nor is it possible to get the non-verbal feedback one gets when reading.

There has been a flurry of covid poems (some of them brilliant and some awful) and several covid anthologies are calling for poems, including one being produced by the Gloucestershire Poet Laureate, Z.D Dicks. Write Where We Are Now is an initiative by the Manchester Writing School and fronted by Carol Ann Duffy, creating online a living record of the crisis.

Pandemics have been a subject I have been interested in for decades. The threat and reality of the plague appears in my Healer's Shadow trilogy. And in my files I have an unfinished poem cycle about the impact of illness and environmental depredation on the collapse of the Roman Empire.

In the last month I have written two poems that might be termed covid poems. But as is usually the way with what I write they aren't a direct take on the subject. I am cautious about writing about covid now. Everything I write comes from somewhere in my brain where it has been brewing for a while. It is linked to my mental wellbeing.

Never has it been more the case that we write about what we must. For some people that is about virus, for others they need to write about anything but. The current anthologies can only capture a snapshot, and a valid one, but the best work on the subject may well be written in hindsight.

Doors Close, Doors Open

At Piranha Poetry

I was chatting to an old school friend of mine last week and we both commented on how sometimes your life can suddenly change: doors close and new ones open. They certainly have for me over the past year.

My life in the Czech Republic has ended. Out of the blue a buyer came forward with an offer for my house there and I could not refuse. Last month I spent a fortnight in the country getting rid of most of my things and storing a few others, handing in my Czech residency papers, and handing over the keys. The door to my Czech home literally closed.

I am near to closing another literal door. As I said in the a previous post my mother died at the end of June and my life as a carer came to an end. Of course there has been work to do for her since her death. Over the last month I have been clearing one room a week in her house. It will take me another four weeks before the house is in a state ready to be put on the market.

The door that has opened is of course poetry. With my collection with Indigo Dreams (now called Owl Unbound) due out later in the year I have work to do. Firstly there is the editting of the collection prior to sending the finished version to Indigo Dreams, this I think is pretty well done. Then there is the need to get some readings sorted. The best place to sell books is at readings and that means getting my name around ahead of the book launch.

In the last two months I have given readings in Gloucester and Bristol, as well as at the launch of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal (I had three poems in the magazine) and at open mic's in Stroud, Gloucester and Cheltenham. I must confess I loved performing my poetry. It gives me such as buzz.

The other poetry work I have been busy with is helping Anna Saunders with her Cheltenham Poetry Festival. As I may have said elsewhere in this blog I have a background in organising community events, so it isn't hard to get back into the swing of working on an event. It is great to be able just to help out, rather than be the director.

There will be more about the Festival in another post, but for now here is the link to the amazing programme Anna has put together: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/cheltenhampoetryfestival
With performers as diverse as hip-hop legend JPDL and former Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, there really is something for everyone.

Speaking Poetry

A young Zoe reading poetry at the Young Arts Centre

I have always believed that poetry is primarily a spoken art. It certainly is for me and has always been. My mother told me that I composed poetry before I knew how to write it down and the same is true of poetry historically or should I say prehistorically. 

I still like to see the poem on the page and indeed usually buy a book if I have enjoyed a reading, but listening to a good reader of poetry can be an awesome and illuminating experience. Alas not all poets know how to read well. A good reader will reveal the poem's structure and music, giving it another dimension.

Now that I am back on the poetry scene, I have started reading to audiences again. The other day at Buzzwords, Anna Saunders complemented me on how I read and I replied that I learned young. Last Friday I went to Alison Brackenbury's party to launch her new book Gallop*, where we met up with an old friend, Christine Whittemore. Both Christine and I read in the open mic and frankly you could tell that we both had been trained in reading. When I say "trained", I don't mean taught in the conventional way. We both went to Cheltenham's Young Arts Centre, where we were active members of the EOS poetry group. Every year the group would put on at least two public poetry readings. Those readings would include our own poems and those of famous poets. I don't recall being taught how to read or project my voice, but then the Centre's director, Elizabeth Webster, was a teacher with such skill you weren't aware that you were learning from her. 

When I moved to London, I started reading with Michael Horovitz's Grandchildren of Albion crowd, which included some amazing poet readers. And now here I am again reading and loving it. Anna has asked me to read at next year's Cheltenham Poetry Festival. I am so looking forward to it. You can hear me reading four poems here.

*Alison is an excellent reader and Gallop, a selection of some of the best poems over her long career, should be on everyone's Christmas list. There is currently a discount on it on Carcanet's website: https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784106959

Changes

My mother died at the end of June. I have been spending a lot of my time caring for her and before that my father over the last three years. As she was 89 and had Alzheimer's we knew her death was coming, but nevertheless it was a shock. But the blessing was that the disease did not take from her the awareness of who we were, she was still our mum.

Mum was very important in fostering my writing, especially my poetry. She had wanted to study English at university and would have done so had not her father's death meant that she needed to earn money for her family. When it became clear that I was naturally talented in poetry, I was given poetry books. I still remember poems from Happenings, and Junior Voices. But perhaps more importantly Mum encouraged me to look and to imagine. We would go on long walks and she would point out flowers, trees, animals. "Look, Zoe. Do you see that tree root? What do you think it looks like?" When I replied that it looked like a witch or a dragon's claw, she would be delighted.

When I sat with her in the last few months, I sometimes read poetry to her and she loved it.  Poetry has that power.  Despite her Alzheimer's she beamed when I showed her a magazine with one of my poems in it and a spark appeared in her eyes. 

With Mum gone, I have the freedom and time, and perhaps the emotional energy, to really pursue my poetry career. It is what she would have wanted. I am preparing a collection for submission to publishers. I have a publisher in mind already. In fact looking over the body of my work, I have enough for several books and I continue to add more poems, including one recently about her death.

Today would have been her 90th birthday. Happy Birthday, Mum.

"The Worst Enemy to Creativity is Self Doubt"

Well I have done it, at last. I have started sending my poems to magazines again.

When I was younger I was regularly published in  magazines, including South West Review, The Rialto, Aquarius, Pennine Platform, and others. I was probably on the point of getting my first collection, but something happened.

I lost confidence. I have since discovered, this is not uncommon among women poets. Jo Bell and Jane Commane write about it in their excellent book How to be a Poet .  And I had a similar conversation about the issue with Briony Bax (editor of Ambit) at the Poetry Book Fair.  My loss of confidence was ridiculous really. I had two great poets saying I was good (Michael Horovitz, Philip Larkin) and still I gave up submitting.

There were some mitigating circumstances I suppose. Looking back I was struggling with depression, something neither I nor my husband really confronted. My way of dealing it was to stop being a full-time mum and taking on a demanding job, which meant I was balancing motherhood, career and poetry. Poetry was what suffered. My poetry was increasingly taking the form of long sequences or indeed long poems and so not exactly suited to magazine submission, and I used that as an excuse for doing nothing. Then of course the longer I left submitting poems, the harder it was to get back into doing so.

But that is behind me now. I have restarted submitting poems and already in just a month I have had three poems shortlisted for publication, so that is good for my confidence. Fingers crossed the poems make it to publication.

In case you are wondering about the quote in the title of this post - it is from Sylvia Plath.

The Girl Who Forgets How To Walk by Kate Davis

This review first appeared on my magic realism books blog.

"We never speak of it, but here we know the land
can t be trusted"

The debut collection from Cumbrian poet Kate Davis tells a personal narrative of contracting polio as a young girl, her subsequent disability and slow rehabilitation. A book of things known and not known, of untrustworthy ground and unsteady bodies, The Girl Who Forgets How to Walk finds comfort in the ancient limestone of her home county as she teaches herself to move again along its hills and coastlines. Inspiring, funny and deeply personal, with this book Davis creates her own map to navigate the wild landscape, demonstrating a unique connection to the earth beneath us.

Amazon description

After 278 posts, the vast majority of them reviews of magic realist books, I have rather run out of steam as evidenced by the low number of reviews this year. I don't want to stop posting on this blog, as I get great pleasure from sharing with you. But I have decided I need to make some changes - one is a bit of a break from reviewing novels. I will still review a magic realist novel when I read one, but I want to diversify. I have already reviewed an exhibition and a theatrical production, but there is one literary form which I have yet to review and yet it is ideally suited to inclusion in this blog and that is poetry. Of course this will require me to gain new skills and approaches, but then I need something new. I just ask that you bear with me as I find my way. 

The back cover of Kate Davis' poetry collection states Kate Davis writes magical realist poems, born of the hills, marshes and coastal edgelands of south Cumbria. And she does so wonderfully. 

The suite of poems The Girl Who Forgets How To Walk is the central section of the collection. It focuses on the story of the girl with polio. The beginning and concluding sections are made up of poems which complement it, being more focused on the landscape, its history and archaeology of Cumbria. These poems, while providing a setting to the girl's story (before and after her illness), do so much more.The girl's body afflicted by polio and the landscape mirror each other - 

We never speak of it, but here we know the land can't be trusted.

But the relationship between the Cumbrian landscape and the girl is a complex one. She wants to find the footpaths for herself. When she is shown geological maps she sees what is inside herself instead of seeing what is in the earth. In one of my favourite poems the members of the family are described as different rocks - 

Our mother was a stony outcrop,

our father a cobble chucked in a pond

and sunk.

A few poems, such as the one where she sees people floating in mid-air, are very obviously magic realist. But as I have written so many times magic realism is a sensibility and nearly all these poems share it. 

One of the joys of this work is that while Kate David deals with a highly personal and difficult issue she does so in a way that is joyous and even at times humourous. 

I recommend this collection to you.

Czech fox

I have just submitted my poem Midday Fox for possible inclusion in an anthology. 

I have often blogged about my local fox in my Czech blog. I will see our local fox making its way across the fields as I walk up from the bus or down from the woods. And I have come to associate it with creativity. One of my favourite poems is Ted Hughes' Thought Fox, which is for my money the best poem about the writing process I know. 

As some readers of this blog will be aware one important reason why I bought my Czech house is that I needed somewhere to write. It is so to speak my den, my dark hole, built into the hillside, a hill called Fox's Lair. Over the last year I have indeed started to write again, and not just this blog, and superstitiously I have partly put it down to my fox companion. Even when I do not see him, I hear him in the woods above the house, tormenting the village dogs. "Ha!" he seems to be saying, "You have sold your freedom for a bowl of meat. I have the woods, all the roots and dark places as my kingdom." And at this the village dogs go mad with vain barking.

I have put his face on my door in the form of a brass knocker, he hangs on the wall as one of a set of horse brasses, I have drawn him in oil pastels. And the more I find out about him and his place in folklore and superstition, the more I think I have found the right familiar. A month or so ago I was telling my husband about this, and how strangely although I had been writing almost continuously, my fox had kept out of sight. My husband stopped me at this point "Look, look," he said. There in broad daylight no more than a metre away from the window my fox was strolling across the grass in the direction of the neighbours' chickens.

A Poetry New Year Resolution

For my magic realism review blog I recently read and reviewed Larque On The Wing by Nancy Springer. In it a middle-aged woman is forced to confront her 10-year old self. The child reminds the woman of the early dreams and aspirations that she has abandoned. It made me think what that girl in the centre of the photo above would have thought of the adult me. That Zoe was confident in her ability as a poet with reason. By the time I was 13 I had been published and was getting noticed. I had no fear about what I wrote, no self doubts. I took the plaudits without embarrassment or question. When the Director of the Cheltenham Literature Festival told me that Philip Larkin, no less, had said I was the best young poet in Britain, I was pleased but not surprised. I didn’t realize what a big deal it was and made no effort to get that in writing. How many times have I regretted that since!

What happened? Well – life in many ways. My gift was too easy, too natural. It came and went without my being in control. I can go for years without writing a poem and trying to force it just doesn’t seem to work. I have intermittently written several major pieces of poetry in a flurry of white-hot words, sufficient to make a body of work, but there are long periods of non-production. These periods were filled with career, motherhood and all the other joyous demands on my attention. But shouldn’t I also be doing something about placing my poetry in the public domain?

Two years ago I had a serious and life-threatening health emergency. I had always thought that I had time to promote my work, but as I lay in the hospital bed hitched to a monitor it was pretty clear that that was a false assumption. I published one of my long poems for voices –Fool’s Paradise – as an ebook with Amazon and won the EPIC (Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition) award for best poetry book in 2013. But I have not published it as a physical book.

As a poet I am very aware that even the books of the most successful poets have limited print-runs, so I know I won't make a great deal of money from poetry. But poetry is my first love.  But what must I do to reach out and make my audience aware of my presence? It means going public, of marketing, of pushing my work and that does not come easily. How I wish I had that young girl beside me, to give me the confidence and the necessary chutzpah I find I am so lacking now. Ironically it is not that I doubt the quality of what I have written, I have never lost that inner belief. It is the translation of that into some public action that is so difficult. So here is a New Year Resolution – I will get off my insecure butt and face this. I am not yet sure how, but I will do something.

What Magic Realism Means to Me

I am running a magic realism bloghop again this year. Some twenty blogs are signed up to take part and if last year’s bloghop is anything to go by, there will be some fascinating posts.

Over on the Magic Realism Books blog I have scheduled posts about magic realist fiction available free from the web, about useful magic realism resources and a review of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which features on all the magic realism lists as one of the most important magic realist books ever written and is one of my all-time favourite books. Despite having written three posts for my other blog I want to write a more personal post here on my personal blog about what magic realism means to me.

Of course there is good and bad magic realism, magic realist books that last for ever in your mind and others that are easily forgotten. But as a general rule I find that the magic realist approach to portraying the world is one that I respond to and I recognize that it reflects my own experience. That is not to say that I have seen people ascend to heaven, been followed by crowds of butterflies when I fell in love or watched a relative turn into an item of furniture. But rather that I believe in allegory and metaphor, in imagery, in archetypes and in a heightened awareness that extends beyond “physical” reality.

For me, realism is overestimated. It excludes the profound. It does not allow my soul to soar. Nor does it take me to the depths beyond pain. I am and have always been a poet and a bit of a mystic. For a while, as a student, I neglected that side of my personality in favour of the rational and the academic. I stopped writing. It didn’t last. The subconscious has a way of hitting back and my health suffered. Unable to think straight because of the pain, my reason dropped away and I was left with only instinct and intuition to fall back on – magic one might say. The poetry came flooding back.  The result was my cycle of somewhat mystical poetry Poem for Voices. 

Winner - EPIC Ebook awards

My poem for voices Fool’s Paradise has won the best Poetry Book category in the EPIC (The Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition) ebook awards. 

Blurb:Three travellers meet a fool and his dog on the road to a great city. This long poem for multiple voices follows the divine fool and his companions on a journey to hell itself.

Poems for multiple voices

When Carolyn Howard Johnson reviewed my poetry book Fool’s Paradise as “Very experimental. Wholly original” I was surprised. Of course I don’t think of what I write as particularly original, what I write feels normal.  So Caroline’s review made me think, after all Caroline is a multi award-winning poet.

As I have said in previous post I was blessed with being taught by an inspiring creative English teacher – Elizabeth Webster – who introduced me to the work of some wonderful and great poets. In particular she introduced me to the work of the British poets of the early to mid twentieth century – T S Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice. And surprise, surprise the works she first introduced me to were all verse plays: Murder in the Cathedral by T S Eliot, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas and The Dark Tower by Louis MacNeice. 

Those early readings were etched into my memory and, I suspect, my poetic DNA. Every year at this time on the cusp of winter I find myself repeating the lines from the opening chorus of Murder in the Cathedral:
Since golden October declined into sombre November
And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud

What is more under her direction I acted in a number of verse plays – including Under Milk Wood and plays by another British verse play writer Christopher Fry. Plays like Under Milk Woodand Louis MacNeice’s Dark Tower were written to be performed on radio, the BBC was a major sponsor of verse drama. But the roots of poetic dramas are deep in the beginnings of theatre. When I was twelve or thirteen I performed in a production of Alcestis by Euripides, first performed in the 5th century BC. I can still remember some of the lines:Daughter of Pelias fare thee well. May joy be thine in the sunless houses.

Just listen to the cadences in that one line. And of course there was Shakespeare. I was playing Caliban in The Tempest at the age of twelve, loving the poetry in the play (Caliban has the isle is full of voices speech) and realizing how verse can by woven into drama. Later I was to play Viola in Twelfth Night – another character with some great poetry. 

The poetry group at the Arts Centre, which Elizabeth ran and of which I was a member, gave regular readings and in one of these we performed MacNeice’s The Dark Tower and in another extracts of Blood Wedding by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The poetry group with its emphasis on reading aloud taught me the importance of poetry as performance. Some of the best poems, even when not written to be read by different voices, are dramatic. And some, such as Eliot’s Four Quartets, although not written as plays nevertheless have different voices woven into them. My long poem called Poem for Voices, is the same.

You can see why writing poetry for different voices is so natural to me.  I don’t always write for voices, many of my poems are to be spoken by one voice. But writing for voices allows me to explore textures, emotions and forms in a unique way. This approach, which was once so prevalent, is now so unusual that Carolyn comments on it. Have I developed it further? I don’t know. It’s just how I write sometimes. But then it does seem to me that if people claim their work is original and experimental it almost certainly isn’t.