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.7: Once they have read the book what do you hope the reader will leave with?

There is so much misunderstanding and derogatory media rhetoric concerning New Travellers, an almost entirely negatively biased reportage. In my experience this is unfounded and New Travellers are for the most part environmentally minded, anti-capitalist, humanitarians. By bringing the reader into my world for a while, I hope to demystify the culture, building bridges that enable house dwellers to approach with a more open mind. That the reader might understand better the practical, ecological choices that are made because one lives close to the earth, identifying with the pain she suffers as a result of human abuse and complacency. In Spoil I empathise with the post-mining landscape and the damaged earth, I want the reader to leave feeling that relationship within their own body. I want them to feel more open hearted and responsible towards Travellers and the planet.

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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.5: As a visual artist, how do you use the white space on the page?

The white of the page is like the hub of a wheel or the space inside a cup, it gives meaning and function to form. Inside an atom is mostly space, it is the dominant feature of the universe, form and emptiness are essentially one as they cannot exist without each other. Space enables the poem to be, so I craft it with equal care.

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More answers to follow.

-Sarah Westcott

grew up in north Devon and lives on the edge of London. Her first pamphlet, Inklings, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry, 2016), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was published this year. Sarah was a news journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance tutor and writer. Work has appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps.

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

Nature is around and within us; language is nature too. The poem is a kind of sensory organ that noses about, a tool to filter the non-human world through language; a way of reaching or rooting into that vexed space between human and non-human that we innately recognise as part of us.

There is a beautiful quote from John Clare in which he says ‘I found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down’. I don’t mean to say I wander around in fields collecting poems like butterflies (although that does sound quite idyllic) but I find inspiration where we live on the edge of London. It is quite a traffic-heavy environment but it is also where the city begins to unravel into something less tightly packed and built-upon. I can look out of the window and see the Dartford Crossing and also the office blocks of London. I went purposefully and a bit self-consciously to encounter Nature in the North Kent marshes and was amazed to hear nightingales singing in the middle of the day. But in the poems, as in my own experience, the beyond-human comes in as a protagonist itself, more than a setting.I think it has seeped into me and is the poem as much as I am, if that makes sense.

Our garden, the skies over it, and the small river that runs near, the patch of ancient woodland, Greenwich Park, the roadside verges with lizards and vetch, all these places are in me, and in the poems. A lot of the time, in the first lockdown last Spring, I looked out of the window at the beauty of the world, especially in the early evening. I was behind glass but I could feel and smell the intensity, the conditional fragility of the trees, pear blossom, bird song, sirens.

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The best place to buy a signed copy is to contact her directly (send a DM on twitter) or email Sarah.westcott@tiscali.co.uk

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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: 4: Australian poet, Les Murray, who was also Catholic, saw nature as the embodiment of God’s presence on earth. How do you see nature through your faith?

God is supremely loving, good, creative, and generous. Nature—from galaxies to subatomic particles and everything in between—is God’s creation. Nature is a proof of God, revealing him but not fully representing him (just as my poem is proof of my existence and reveals me but doesn’t fully represent me). There is broad, deep, universal order in nature, and everything is related. Only a Creator could make that happen. 

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More answers tomorrow.

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.4: How important is form in your poetry?

I write without punctuation so form is essential to me as a way of giving the reader the rhythm of the poem. I am also a visual artist, for me, how the poetry looks on the page is important. I use line break, stanzas, space, and shape, to drive and guide a person through the poem.

*******

More answers to follow

-Sarah Westcott

grew up in north Devon and lives on the edge of London. Her first pamphlet, Inklings, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry, 2016), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was published this year. Sarah was a news journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance tutor and writer. Work has appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps.

Q:5: What do you find it easiest to write in, first, second or third person, and why?

This completely varies with the poem. My initial freewrites are often in the first person but what a slippery creature the self is!

How can I represent ‘I’? Perhaps it can never be a whole — always a fragment, a snapshot, a metaphor. I like the directness of tone in the second person address, the intimacy of it especially in epistolary form. Sometimes I like to write through the natural world to access a first person perspective –  to sidle quietly up to it before it startles and runs away. The use of third person for me tends to tip me towards prose or short fiction. I am not sure why. Something to do with the immediacy of accessing the raw material, I think.

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The best place to buy a signed copy is to contact her directly (send a DM on twitter) or email Sarah.westcott@tiscali.co.uk

*******

More answers tomorrow.

-Sarah Westcott

grew up in north Devon and lives on the edge of London. Her first pamphlet, Inklings, was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice and Slant Light (Pavilion Poetry, 2016), was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second collection, Bloom, also with Pavilion Poetry, was published this year. Sarah was a news journalist for twenty years and now works as a freelance tutor and writer. Work has appeared on beermats, billboards and buses, baked into sourdough bread and installed in a nature reserve, triggered by footsteps.

Q:4. How important is form in your poetry ?

It depends on the poem – I listen to it and feel it. Each poem finds its final form, or the form shows itself, through editing and reading aloud.  Formal form is something I would like to become more confident with. I teach it but I don’t necessarily feel any sense of managing it very well it when I write myself – I imagine it must be a little like riding a horse, reining it in and getting it gallop at different points. I feel I need muscles and experience that I don’t have yet. So when I write in strict form the poems can feel unrealised. I need more practice. I admire Hannah Lowe and Jacqui Saphra’s formal fluidity and deftness. It is like they can pick up an instrument and play it.

I like thinking of the space around the poem as a kind of living humming forcefield or a kind of skin which we pierce with text. This gives the space around the poem more reverence and helps shape the lines and line endings, the shape and where the breath falls.  

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The best place to buy a signed copy is to contact her directly (send a DM on twitter) or email Sarah.westcott@tiscali.co.uk

*******

More answers tomorrow.