this  is the link

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/morag-smith-spoil?fbclid=IwAR0aMNZOoIKgql0pIKtSrsE1Y50rfuERQ7IT1s_HsEeMXtikCapNBzv5ero

-Morag Smith

is a Cornish poet, painter, writer, and performer. She graduated in 2020 with a first in Creative Writing from Falmouth University, winning a prize for her dissertation. In 2018 she won the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival, Shorelines competition. Her pamphlet, Spoil, was published by Broken Sleep Books in October 2021. Her poetry is published in various literary journals including International Times, as well as the eco-anthology, Warming! As a New Traveller she brought her children up close to nature, in trucks, caravans, and houses. She writes about her experiences, about our ravaged landscape, and bears witness to the poverty of British people. At the moment she is publishing a book of poetry about plastic pollution in our oceans, a collaboration with artist Jasmine Davies, and the Clean Ocean Sailing charity.

The Interview

Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in your book?

Spoil looks at my own history within the landscape of Cornwall and Cornish history as a landscape within me, it is chronological. It starts with the Nebra Sky Disc, the oldest map in the world, its tin and gold from Cornwall, the minerals magnetised back to their birthplace, as I was to Heligan. Spoil is the map and the journey. I am the soil and the story.

*******

More answers tomorrow.

-Carol Parris Krauss

lives in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Her work is distinctly Southern, with a strong sense of time and place. This high school English teacher is a watcher, and is not afraid to tackle current issues and concerns.

Carol serves as a reader for Full House Literary Magazine .

As a heads up here is a link to the 2019 interview I did with Carol: https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/02/25/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-carol-parris-krauss/

Q:4. How do you recognise truth in poetry?

I recognize the truth and the lies in poetry. I think the reader chooses what they see depending on their personal experience, just as the writer chooses when they create and compose.

*******

More answers tomorrow.

-Jane Greer

published and edited Plains Poetry Journal in the 80s and 90s. Harry Duncan’s Cummington Press published her first poetry collection, Bathsheba on the Third Day, in 1986. Lambing Press published her second collection, Love like a Conflagration, in 2020 and will publish her third in 2022. Greer lives in North Dakota. 

Lambing Press:

Love Like a Conflagration

Amazon:

The Interview:

Q: 2: How important is nature in your poetry?

Nature features prominently in my poetry—as a metaphor for human nature. (The job of poetry is to heal what’s broken, to uncover meaning and relationship.) Seasonal change has strong effects on human emotions: my poems explore why. And birds of all sorts often crop up in my poems because birds are such wonderful mirrors of the human psyche. 

*******

More answers tomorrow.

-Marcel Herms

is a Dutch visual artist. He is also one of the two men behind the publishing house Petrichor. Freedom is very important in the visual work of Marcel Herms. In his paintings he can express who he really is in complete freedom. Without the social barriers of everyday life. There is a strong relationship with music. Like music, Herms’ art is about autonomy, freedom, passion, color and rhythm. You can hear the rhythm of the colors, the rhythm of the brushstrokes, the raging cry of the pencil, the subtle melody of a collage. The figures in his paintings rotate around you in shock, they are heavily abstracted, making it unclear what they are doing. Sometimes they look like people, monsters, children or animals, or something in between. Sometimes they disappear to be replaced immediately or to take on a different guise. The paintings invite the viewer to join this journey. Free-spirited. He collaborated with many different authors, poets, visual artists and audio artists from around the world and his work was published by many different publishers. http://marcelherms.nl

The Interview

Q:4: After having looked through the book what do you wish the viewer to leave with?

To be honest, when making my art (and therefore also with this book) I’m not so concerned with what the viewer/reader will think of it. But I hope that the viewer is intrigued by the interplay of the drawings and the underlying images/text and the unexpected effects that arise as a result. That’s what I really like about it: it’s a surprise on every page how that turns out.

*******

The book may be purchased here: https://uitgeverijpetrichor.nl/product/youre-the-bone-machine/

*******

More answers tomorrow.

After much chewing the cud, my weekly book reviews will become “growing intos”, so I will add a comment, a deliberation over the weeks until I am satisfied, for the moment that I have said enough. It is my organic process of assessment. Returning to the poetry is part of it. It is how I read. 

An ecopoetic and zoopoetic powerhouse of a 28 poem collection. Her final poem “journey of the light travellers” is an empathic devastating critique of wind farms. “Woodlice” is from the insects point of view and, for me, captures it perfectly.

A lot of the poems enact transformation, metamorphosis “They come/the seekers of freedom/shedding the skin of crowds//Emerge/displaced and solitary/haunters of canal paths/

-Jane Greer

published and edited Plains Poetry Journal in the 80s and 90s. Harry Duncan’s Cummington Press published her first poetry collection, Bathsheba on the Third Day, in 1986. Lambing Press published her second collection, Love like a Conflagration, in 2020 and will publish her third in 2022. Greer lives in North Dakota. 

Lambing Press:

Love Like a Conflagration

Amazon:

The Interview

Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in the book?

I don’t believe that the order of the poems in most collections has much significance. In most collections, the order is not organic to the work; it’s imposed after creation. Order can bring pleasure and surprise—Psalm 23 comes immediately after Psalm 22!—but it’s not essential. 

Each of my poems (collected in no particular order over many years) is its own universe. “Ordering” them daunts me, but it seems to be expected, so I do my best. 

Love like a Conflagration is really two books. The first half is newer poems, and the second half is a republication of my 1986 collection, Bathsheba on the Third Day. Bathsheba was first published in a limited edition of 300 copies, hand-set and hand-printed by Harry Duncan at The Cummington Press. He was a legend. I was so new and ignorant that I didn’t fully realize at the time what it meant to be published by Harry Duncan. As I recall, he suggested the order of the poems in Bathsheba and I was relieved that he did so. 

In the front half of Conflagration, I had, from the beginning, wanted “Micha-el” first, as a standalone. I think it’s one of the best poems in the book. When Modern Age published it in 2019, people on Twitter really seemed to like it. And it subtly encapsulates themes I had discovered running through the entire collection: desire, transgression, repentance, salvation. A line in “Micha-el” became the collection’s title. The rest of the poems in the front of the book seemed to fall, very roughly, into pre-repentance and post-repentance themes, so that’s how I arranged them. It was all I could think of—but it seems to work.

*******

More answers tomorrow.

-Carol Parris Krauss

lives in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Her work is distinctly Southern, with a strong sense of time and place. This high school English teacher is a watcher, and is not afraid to tackle current issues and concerns.

Carol serves as a reader for Full House Literary Magazine .

As a heads up here is a link to the 2019 interview I did with Carol: https://thewombwellrainbow.com/2019/02/25/wombwell-rainbow-interviews-carol-parris-krauss/

Q:3. How important is form in your poetry?

 I look to form choice last in almost all of my work. This is something I am working on, because the visual appearance of a poem is a reader magnet. I finish my poems, and then began to move, shorten, lengthen, and modify. I am not analytical, so the format poems such as the sonnet or ghazal, make my head pound a bit. I did include a haibun in  Just a Spit down the Road.

*******

More answers tomorrow.

-Marcel Herms

is a Dutch visual artist. He is also one of the two men behind the publishing house Petrichor. Freedom is very important in the visual work of Marcel Herms. In his paintings he can express who he really is in complete freedom. Without the social barriers of everyday life. There is a strong relationship with music. Like music, Herms’ art is about autonomy, freedom, passion, color and rhythm. You can hear the rhythm of the colors, the rhythm of the brushstrokes, the raging cry of the pencil, the subtle melody of a collage. The figures in his paintings rotate around you in shock, they are heavily abstracted, making it unclear what they are doing. Sometimes they look like people, monsters, children or animals, or something in between. Sometimes they disappear to be replaced immediately or to take on a different guise. The paintings invite the viewer to join this journey. Free-spirited. He collaborated with many different authors, poets, visual artists and audio artists from around the world and his work was published by many different publishers. http://marcelherms.nl

The Interview

Q:3: What made you sure that the book was finished?

As I said the pages of the book are from an anatomy book. Original pages. And that meant I could only use a limited number of pages per book. I made 20 books and then ran out of original pages.

*******

The book may be purchased here: https://uitgeverijpetrichor.nl/product/youre-the-bone-machine/

*******

More answers tomorrow.